Medusavirus is a genus of nucleocytoplasmic large DNA viruses that is the sole representative of Mamonoviridae (from mamono (), the Japanese word for "monster" in reference to Megaviricetes + -viridae). It was first isolated from a Japanese hot spring in 2019. It notably encodes all five types of histones — H1, H2A, H2B, H3, and H4 — which are involved in DNA packaging in eukaryotes, raising the possibility that they may have been involved in the origin of eukaryotes. The virus can harden amoebae of the species Acanthamoeba castellanii into stone-like cysts, but infection usually causes infect
Medusavirus is a genus of nucleocytoplasmic large DNA viruses that is the sole representative of Mamonoviridae (from mamono (), the Japanese word for "monster" in reference to Megaviricetes + -viridae). It was first isolated from a Japanese hot spring in 2019. It notably encodes all five types of histones — H1, H2A, H2B, H3, and H4 — which are involved in DNA packaging in eukaryotes, raising the possibility that they may have been involved in the origin of eukaryotes. The virus can harden amoebae of the species Acanthamoeba castellanii into stone-like cysts, but infection usually causes infected amoebas to burst open. The virus was named after Medusa, the monster in Greek mythology whose gaze turned people to stone.
== Taxonomy == Medusavirus is a part of a phylum called Nucleocytoviricota, which is referred as nucleocytoplasmic large DNA virus (NCLDV). These viruses have a large double-stranded DNA genome and the length of the genome could be more than 100kb. NCLDV infects various eukaryotic hosts such as amoebas.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).