Pandoravirus is a proposed genus of giant virus, first discovered in 2013. It is the fourth largest in physical size of any known viral genus, behind Pithovirus, Klothovirus casanovai, and Megaklothovirus. Pandoraviruses have double stranded DNA genomes, with the largest genome size (2.5 million base pairs) of any known viral genus.
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Pandoravirus is a proposed genus of giant virus, first discovered in 2013. It is the fourth largest in physical size of any known viral genus, behind Pithovirus, Klothovirus casanovai, and Megaklothovirus. Pandoraviruses have double stranded DNA genomes, with the largest genome size (2.5 million base pairs) of any known viral genus.
== Discovery == The discovery of Pandoraviruses by a team of French scientists, led by husband and wife Jean-Michel Claverie and Chantal Abergel, was announced in a report in the journal Science in July 2013. Other scientists had previously observed the pandoravirus particles, but owing to their enormous size they were not expected to be viruses. Patrick Scheid, a parasitologist from the Central Institute of the Bundeswehr Medical Service in Koblenz, Germany, found one in 2008, in an amoeba living in the contact lens of a woman with keratitis. Its development within the amoebal host was documented extensively. Unlike in other cases with such giant viruses, the large particles within Acanthamoeba were not mistaken for bacteria. The authors initially termed them "endocytobionts".
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).