BACKGROUND Mycobacterium smegmatis is a rapidly-growing mycobacterium causing rare opportunistic infections in human patients. It is present in soil and water environments where free-living amoeba also reside, but data regarding M. smegmatis-amoeba relationships have been contradictory from mycobacteria destruction to mycobacteria survival. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Using optic and elect...

Acanthamoeba polyphaga mimivirus is a member of the giant nucleocytoplasmic large DNA viruses, infecting various Acanthamoeba spp. The genomes of giant viruses encode components previously thought to be exclusive to cellular life, such as proteins involved in nucleic acid and protein synthesis. Recent work on enzymes involved in carbohydrate biosynthesis and metabolism show that instead of util...

The initial analysis of the recently sequenced genome of Acanthamoeba polyphaga Mimivirus, the largest known double-stranded DNA virus, predicted a proteome of size and complexity more akin to small parasitic bacteria than to other nucleocytoplasmic large DNA viruses and identified numerous functions never before described in a virus. It has been proposed that the Mimivirus lineage could have e...

Mimivirus, the largest virus known to date, is an amebal pathogen-like Legionella sp. When Mimivirus was used as an antigen in a microimmunofluorescense assay, seroconversion was found in patients with both community- and hospital-acquired pneumonia. Mimivirus DNA was found in respiratory samples of a patient with hospital-acquired pneumonia.

Members of the Mimiviridae family are large DNA viruses that infect Acanthamoeba cells. Here, we report the genome sequences of two new Mimiviridae family members, isolated from water samples from Shirakoma Pond and the mouth of the Arakawa River in Japan, with nearly complete genome sizes of 1,182,849 and 1,182,801 bp, respectively.

We present a proof-of-concept three-dimensional reconstruction of the giant mimivirus particle from experimentally measured diffraction patterns from an x-ray free-electron laser. Three-dimensional imaging requires the assembly of many two-dimensional patterns into an internally consistent Fourier volume. Since each particle is randomly oriented when exposed to the x-ray pulse, relative orienta...

The discovery and genome sequencing of the mimivirus, a parasite of Acanthamoeba, blurs the boundary between viruses and cells: the 1.2 Mb genome of the mimivirus is predicted to contain 1262 genes and is much bigger than the genomes of many parasitic bacteria.