A strange life form has been identified in Bradford. Genetic analysis reveals that the organism is so bizarre and unlike anything else seen by scientists that perhaps it should be placed in its own category of living things.The creature, first discovered in a small industrial cooling tower on the outskirts of the city, could qualify for a new "domain" in the tree of life - where a domain is a bigger category than a kingdom or a phylum.The "giant virus", dubbed the Mimivirus, or "mimicking microbe", because it was first mistaken for a bacterium, inhabits amoebae and is more than twice as big as any other virus so far found. At about half a millionth of a metre across - around the size of a small bacterium - it is one of the few that can be seen under a light microscope.Two research teams in the Marseille School of Medicine, led by Prof Didier Raoult and Prof Jean-Michel Claverie, have "read" the genetic code of the organism and found a number of genes previously thought to belong only to more complex life forms.The size and complexity of the Mimivirus genetic code - which is 1.2 million "letters" long, at least 10 times larger than the code of a typical virus - "challenges the established frontier between viruses and parasitic cellular organisms", they report today in the journal Science.
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