Virus-like particles a wasp’s way of making more wasps

If I may interrupt the politics for a bit with a sciencey note, I strongly recommend reading this blog post at Small Things Considered (the go-to site for all things microbial and smaller): parasitoid wasps insert viral-like particles, or VLPs, into the host caterpillars in which they lay their eggs. They make the immune system of the host non-responsive.

I find this interesting, because one of the unsolved mysteries is the origins of viruses – this shows that at least some of them might have started life as manipulative nucleic acids (although these are DNA not RNA viroids). However, the evidence is this VLP system is the result of viral infection. It looks like the wasps have integrated some of the virus’s genes into its own genome and uses them to generate the VLPs for its own purposes. Weird and interesting stuff.

I particularly like microbial-and-smaller biology because it can break the hold over our intuitions that “macrobial” biology, particularly zoology, but also most eukaryotic biology, has. “Exotic” cases stress our comfortable certainties.