New Virus Breaks the Rules of Infection

I think an alien looking at life on earth might find it very peculiar that so many of our life forms split into 2 independent parts that are unable to reproduce unless they match up with a partner of the opposite "sex". This is no stranger than that -- but it's fascinating to us who haven't encountered it before.

The "sex" thing turns out to have big advantages: mostly that it allows for faster evolution by allowing mixing of genes between the two different genders so new advantageous traits can be spread through the population much faster than if each organism simply copied itself. I'll bet this scheme has advantages too -- the smaller size of the components (useful for getting through various membranes and other defenses) is an obvious one, there may be others that are less obvious.

Surprisingly, sci-news.com has a better writeup on this than NPR - http://www.sci-news.com/biology/guaico-culex-virus-multicomp...

“Although multicomponent genomes are relatively common among RNA viruses that infect plants and fungi, this method of genome organization has not previously been seen in animal viruses.”

Edit: Thinking about this more, I wonder if this might be some sort of virus crossover vector from plants to animals? Mosquitos are in a somewhat unique position ecologically - they require nectar from plants to survive, and they may bite several different animals to acquire blood for reproduction (spreading viruses along the way).

Just a thought: I wonder if the virus uses some form of redundancy encoding like certain RAID or file XOR systems use. I wonder if RNA/DNA has a checksum or data correction code somewhere?

It would be really neat if this virus does something like that. It might be why the 5th viral component is not required.