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A “crazy” new lifeform has been found lurking inside our bodies, scientists said.
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Virus-like entities called “obelisks” — circular bits of genetic material that contain one or two genes and self-organize into a rod-like shape — appear in half of the world’s population, but were only found when researchers were searching for patterns that didn’t match any known organisms in genetic libraries, the U.K.’s Daily Mail reported.
They colonize the bacteria inside the mouths and guts of humans, according to the Mail, living in their host for about one year.
Scientists don’t know how they spread.
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Obelisks have genomes of loops of RNA that resemble viroids — viruses that infect plants, leaving experts puzzled as to why they were found in human-associated bacteria.
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“It’s insane,” Mark Peifer, a cell and developmental biologist who was not involved in the research, told Science, per the Daily Mail. “The more we look, the more crazy things we see.”
It not clear if obelisks are harmful or beneficial, but the team suggested they could “exist as stealthy evolutionary passengers.”
These tiny, primitive entities may have played a critical role in shaping the biodiversity that currently exists on Earth, scientists said, as they could be capable of infecting organisms of many different species throughout their evolution.
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Obelisks, viroids and viruses are all technically non-living organisms that depend on a host for survival.
However, some researchers believe that viroids and their relatives represent Earth’s oldest lifeforms.
The research team, led by Stanford biochemist Ivan Zheludev, detected the obelisks by sorting through data from an RNA database that contained thousands of sequences collected from human mouths, guts and other sources.
Their analysis revealed 30,000 distinct obelisk types.
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