Mirusviruses – Relatives of Herpes & Giants are Revealed in the World’s Oceans

The Tara Oceans project has been aiming to reveal more about the vast world of marine microbes, about which we know very little. For years, the schooner Tara sailed the oceans of Earth, collecting samples that could be analyzed with metagenomic techniques. These tools sequence all of the genetic material in a sample, and the sequence data can be compared to databases so that the microorganisms within can be identified, or revealed if they are unknown. This effort has now shown that all over the Earth, there is a major group of microbes called…