Structure and physiology of giant DNA viruses

Although giant viruses have existed for millennia and possibly exerted great evolutionary influence in their environment. Their presence has only been noticed by virologists recently with the discovery of Acanthamoeba polyphaga mimivirus in 2003. Its virion with a diameter of 500 nm and its genome larger than 1 Mpb shattered preconceived standards of what a virus is and triggered world-wide prospection studies. Thanks to these investigations many giant virus families were discovered, each with its own morphological peculiarities and genomes ranging from 0.4 to 2.5 Mpb that possibly encode more than 400 viral proteins. This review aims to present the morphological diversity, the different aspects observed in host-virus interactions during replication, as well as the techniques utilized during their investigation.