On this day in 2011, the world’s largest virus was found in seawater off the coast of Chile, measuring around 10 – 20 times the length of most viruses.
Named Megavirus chilensis, the giant virus infects single-cell marine amoebas and is bigger than the former largest virus, Mimivirus, which was found in a water tower in the UK city of Bradford in 1992.
Professor Jean-Michel Claverie from Aix-Marseille University in France, who was part of the team that made the discovery and authored a paper on it in the journal PNAS, he also told the BBC that Megavirus was bigger than some bacteria.
