Because they rely on hosts for a majority of functions, viruses aren’t considered alive. But entities like this one complicate matters.
Archea has some weird ‘critters’ in it, that much is for certain.
A cellular entity retaining only its replicative core: Hidden archaeal lineage with an ultra-reduced genome https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.02.651781v1
note: biorxiv.org is a pre-print server. this paper has not made it thru the review process, as yet.
I wonder if this is a single cell bacteria in the process of becoming a virus? This could be an important evolutionary link to how viruses come about.
It’s an archaeon, not a bacterium. But that’s one hypothesis, yes. The scientists themselves don’t want to make that claim yet. https://www.science.org/content/article/microbe-bizarrely-tiny-genome-may-be-evolving-virus