The virus may also infect humans and affect the brain.
It’s relatively uncommon for viruses to infect organisms from different kingdoms of life. But now, scientists have determined that a particular virus known to infect green algae can also infect mouse macrophages, a type of immune cell. University of Nebraska-Lincoln researcher David Dunigan says that it’s the only known virus to be able to infect algal and mammalian cells.
In a study published this month in the Journal of Virology, Dunigan and his colleagues found that the virus, ATCV-1, was capable of entering and infecting mouse macrophages, and increasing in mass, suggesting that it was making copies of itself. Following introduction of the virus, the scientists witnessed other cellular changes consistent with infection including cell death, Dunigan says.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.newsweek.com
Apparently Vincent Racaniello says "…finding a virus that can infect organisms in different kingdoms is quite unusual and not something you see every day, though it’s not unheard of.”
I think it is seriously unheard of: apart from reports implicating amoebae-infecting mimiviruses in pneumonia, which is not as great a phylogenetic divide as green algae and humans, I can’t think of anything infecting organisms that are so diverse, UNLESS one of them preys on the other.
Like insects and plants, for example: there are insect- and plant-infecting rhabdoviruses and reoviruses and bunyaviruses. However, these viruses infect insects and plants that have been bound up in a predator-prey relationship for many millions of years, and which have consequently shared their nanobiota.
This does NOT apply to this case, where there is no obvious link between free-living green algae and humans – as in, the algae do not colonise human skin or internal organs.
Just more proof – if we needed any – that viruses are awesome B-)
See on Scoop.it – Aquatic Viruses
ViroBlogy 
This is quite a big deal: there are very few cereal-infecting geminiviruses described from Eurasia, let alone symptomatic maize-infecting mastreviruses whose closest relatives come from Isle de la Reunion in the South Indian Ocean and Nigeria.
Mastreviruses are not seed-transmitted, so how did it get there? What is transmitting it? Is it possibly the elusive Bajra streak virus from India, that was described but never sequenced?
The authors say, in their conclusion:
“To date, other than MSV, MSRV is the only mastrevirus species that has ever been sampled from maize having maize streak disease symptoms. Interestingly, MSRV was also detected from wild grasses such as Setaria barbata and Rottboellia sp. in Nigeria, suggesting expanded host and geographical ranges for this virus [5]. This first report of MSRV isolates in China reveals that this virus is likely to possess a far greater diversity and distribution than has been appreciated. Because 10 of 22 samples from Yunnan Province, China, were infected with MSRV-YN, for an infection rate of 45.5 %, further work on epidemics of MSRV-YN in China is needed.”
Absolutely! Maize streak, whether caused by MSV or potentially by MRSV, can be a devastating disease – and if this is expanding out of endeminicty in grasses thanks to leafhopper population expansion, or climate change, things could get interesting int hat part of the world.