Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen have shown that giant viruses long thought to exist only as fleeting, free-living particles that can embed themselves permanently in the genome of a multicellular host, lie dormant for generations and then wake up on demand. Their study, published in Nature Microbiology, challenges fundamental assumptions about how giant viruses operate and establishes a powerful new model for studying viral latency in complex organisms.

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