Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Alan Dove, Rich Condit, Dickson Despommier, and Ken Stedman
The complete TWiV team meets with Ken Stedman to discuss the discovery in Boiling Spring Lake of a DNA virus with the capsid of an RNA virus.
Click the arrow above to play, or right-click to download TWiV 195 (77 MB .mp3, 107 minutes).
Subscribe (free): iTunes, RSS, email
Links for this episode:
- Novel virus from an extreme environment (Biol Direct, virology blog)
- Lassen Volcanic National Park
- Tombusviridae, Circoviridae (ViralZone)
- TWiV on Facebook
- Letters read on TWiV 195
Weekly Science Picks
Ken – The Edge of Life trailer and Facebook page
Dickson – The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint by Edward Tufte
Alan – SEMs of insects and spiders via Steve Gschmeissner
Rich – Curiosity Has Landed (Wiki mission summary)
Vincent – Curiosity’s Seven Minutes of Terror (YouTube)
Listener Pick of the Week
Lance – The Vaccine Confidence Project and Immune response video (YouTube)
Anat – Beautiful Science
Send your virology questions and comments to twiv@microbe.tv.
It was great to see Ken discuss this extreme virus research with great enthusiasm. With all the human virus talk these days its nice to switch gears and talk about this. I still scratch my head at how a tombusvirus icosahedral capsid (closely realted to the TBSV plant virus capsid) could package a DNA instead of RNA genome such as this and be stable at pH 3.0 at elevated temperatures. TBSV is considered a “weak” virus with critical cation-stable cites required just to be stable. These cation sites are also apparently conserved within this virus.
With all that aside…I’m excited to see how this story unfolds. I would also love to see Ken bring his enthusiasm and be a contributor to your show 2 or 3 times a year. He fits perfectly with you guys and its nice to mix it up with this type of virology 🙂