A newly discovered class of virus may be at fault in a disease that causes snakes to regurgitate their food, stop eating, and even twist themselves into knots.
Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, found three new viruses in captive snakes with inclusion body disease, a fatal illness that strikes boa constrictors and pythons and causes clumps of proteins to build up in the snakes’ cells. The unusual genetic makeup of the viruses could give scientists clues to virus evolution stretching back to the age of the dinosaurs.
“It is so different from anything out there it’s almost unrecognizable. It’s way out there,” says Joseph DeRisi, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at UCSF who led the work, which appears online August 14 in mBio.