An international team led by Nobel Prize winner Andrew Fire and involving the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology of Plants (IBMCP), a joint centre of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), has discovered a new biological entity in the bacteria that live in our mouth and intestines. This organism, named Obelisk because of its shape,

is a new infectious agent whose genome is simpler than that of viruses and whose function and effects on our health are still unknown. This discovery, made through bioinformatics studies of genetic sequences obtained from human faeces, opens new questions about the origin and evolution of microbiological diversity. The finding is published today in the journal Cell.

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