DAILY STAR
An ancient lifeform has been found inside humans – and it is thought to be inside all of us.
According to experts from Stanford University, the strange lifeform lives inside our guts and mouths. Called Obelisks, it is thought that the weird creatures, which are smaller than a virus, make themselves at home in bacteria and can transfer information to other cells within the body.
And calling them “wildly weird”, the experts have now released a new report classifying them as “lifeforms”.
Led by Mark Peifer, a cell and developmental biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, it states: “Too minimal to be considered a standard life form, these scraps of genetic material are among the smallest known elements to transfer information that can be read by a cell, and the sequences that they encode are new to science.
“Obelisks comprise a class of diverse RNAs that have colonized, and gone unnoticed in, human, and global microbiomes. This supports the notion that Obelisks might include colonists of said human microbiomes.
“The newly discovered biological entity falls somewhere between viruses and viroids.”
