The first virophage, known affably as Sputnik, was discovered by Bernard La Scola and Christelle Desnues in 2008. It was an incredible find, and the first time that anyone had seen a virus targeting another virus. La Scola and Desnues found Sputnik in the unlikeliest of places – the dirty water of a Parisian cooling tower. There, it targets one of the world’s largest viruses, known as “mamavirus”, which in turn infects an amoeba.
Mamavirus creates giant viral factories inside the amoeba to make more copies of itself. But Sputnik hijacks these factories, replicating itself at the expense of its larger host. It doesn’t directly infect mamavirus, but it exploits it enough to severely slow its reproduction.
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