Meet the Obelisks: Mysterious new microbes found in the human body
Meet the Obelisks: Mysterious new microbes found in the human body As biologists gather and analyze extensive quantities of genetic sequences from plants, animals, and microbes, they continue to come upon surprises, which include a few that could call into question the very definition of existence. In January 2024, a brand new virus-like organism was determined that lives in micro organisms that live in the human mouth and gut!! They are referred to as "Obelisk"... Those "obelisks," as the Stanford excavation crew calls them, have genomes that seem like made up of loops of RNA, and sequences belonging to them have been discovered all around the world. "it is crazy," says Mark Pifer, a flora and fauna biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "The more we look, the crazier matters we see." Stanford biologist Andrew Fire, his graduate student Ivan Zheludev, and their colleagues determined these obelisks in a brand new search...