Novel viruses of the family Partitiviridae discovered in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

It has been 49 years since the last discovery of a new virus family in the model yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. A large-scale screen to determine the diversity of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) viruses in S. cerevisiae has identified multiple novel viruses from the family Partitiviridae that have been previously shown to infect plants, fungi, protozoans, and insects.

CRUISE, a Tool for the Detection of Iterons in Circular Rep-Encoding Single-Stranded DNA Viruses.

Iterons are short, repeated DNA sequences that are important for the replication of circular single-stranded DNA viruses. No tools that can reliably predict iterons are currently available. The CRUcivirus Iteron SEarch (CRUISE) tool is a computational tool that identifies iteron candidates near stem-loop structures in viral genomes.

Viruses in astrobiology.

Viruses are the most abundant biological entities on Earth, and yet, they have not received enough consideration in astrobiology. Viruses are also extraordinarily diverse, which is evident in the types of relationships they establish with their host, their strategies to store and replicate their genetic information and the enormous diversity of genes they contain. A viral population, especially if it corresponds to a virus with an RNA genome, can contain an array of sequence variants that greatly exceeds what is present in most cell populations.

StemLoop-Finder: a Tool for the Detection of DNA Hairpins with Conserved Motifs.

Nucleic acid secondary structures play important roles in regulating biological processes. StemLoop-Finder is a computational tool to recognize and annotate conserved structural motifs in large data sets. The program is optimized for the detection of stem-loop structures that may serve as origins of replication in circular replication-associated protein (Rep)-encoding single-stranded (CRESS) DNA viruses.