Researchers Discover New Family of Viruses

The redondoviruses, named for their circular DNA, inhabit the human respiratory tract and may be linked to disease.

Written byCatherine Offord

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The paper
A.A. Abbas et al., “Redondoviridae, a family of small, circular DNA viruses of the human oro-respiratory tract associated with periodontitis and critical illness,” Cell Host & Microbe, 25:P719–29.E4, 2019.

A few years ago, while using DNA sequencing to study the lung microbiomes of people who had received lung transplants, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania stumbled across some unexpected sequences. “We saw a little bit of alignment from some of our reads to a pig virus that hadn’t been studied very much,” says microbiologist Frederic Bushman of the university’s Perelman School of Medicine.

The scientists assembled the sequences and discovered two completely novel, circular viral genomes unlike anything they’d seen before in humans. Suspecting there might be more of these viruses out there, the team searched metagenomic databases of other lung and mouth samples and identified 17 genomes that closely resembled the first two. The ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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