Expanding the size limit of RNA viruses: Evidence of a novel divergent nidovirus in California sea hare, with a ~35.9 kb virus genome

Humberto J Debat

The potential to conduct expression analyses on individual neurons of A. californica without the need of amplification, in naked-eye visible neurons, provide an elegant platform for genomics and physiological analysis within well-defined cellular networks: an ideal pathosystem to address single cell virus dynamics. It is tempting to suggest that the possibility of amalgamation of the study of this novel nido-like virus and a biological model system such as A. californica with a vast research toolkit, would allow the rapid deployment of modern molecular tools, . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It . https://doi.org/10.1101/307678 doi: bioRxiv preprint which could redound in a rapid advancement in the biology of this entity. An impressive example of that is the recent integration of the house flies pathogen Entomophtora muscae into Drosophila melanogaster, which resulted in major advancements in the neurochemistry, genomics and neurobiological aspects of this fungal pathogen (Elya et al., 2017) . In retrospective, it is perhaps worth contemplating the possibility that this hidden entity, present with certainty in samples of more than decade-old studies, might have influenced the outcome of any of the uncountable works published in the last 50 years. It is in this scenario that future studies should eagerly focus on the specific potential effects of this virus and its host. This invaluable information, missing in the literature, would shed light on the evolutionary history of the interaction of this virus and A. californica.