Chantal Abergel

TL;DR: The size and complexity of the Mimivirus genome challenge the established frontier between viruses and parasitic cellular organisms and this new sequence data might help shed a new light on the origin of DNA viruses and their role in the early evolution of eukaryotes.

TL;DR: This work shows that high-quality diffraction data can be obtained with a single X-ray pulse from a non-crystalline biological sample, a single mimivirus particle, which was injected into the pulsed beam of a hard-X-ray free-electron laser, the Linac Coherent Light Source.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used a comparative genomic approach to identify the complete repertoire of resistance genes exhibited by the multidrug-resistant A. baumannii strain AYE, which is epidemic in France, as well as investigate the mechanisms of their acquisition by comparison with the fully susceptible A. bayannii species SDF, associated with human body lice.

TL;DR: The isolation of two giant viruses, one off the coast of central Chile, the other from a freshwater pond near Melbourne, without morphological or genomic resemblance to any previously defined virus families are reported.

TL;DR: A third type of giant virus combining the Pandoravirus morphology with a gene content more similar to that of icosahedral DNA viruses is isolated from a >30,000-y-old radiocarbon-dated sample of Siberian permafrost, suggesting that pandorav virus-like particles may correspond to an unexplored diversity of unconventional DNA virus families.