Marine DNA viral macro- and micro-diversity from pole to pole

By Ann C. Gregory, Ahmed A. Zayed, N. Conceição-Neto, Ben Temperton, Ben Bolduc, A. Alberti, M. Ardyna, K. Arkhipova, Margaux Carmichael, C. Cruaud and 42 more. Cell, 2019

703 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary: Microbes drive most ecosystems and are modulated by viruses that impact their lifespan, gene flow and metabolic outputs. However, ecosystem-level impacts of viral community diversity remains difficult to assess due to classification issues and few reference genomes. Here we establish a ~12-fold expanded global ocean DNA virome dataset of 195,728 viral populations, now including the Arctic Ocean, and validate that these populations form discrete genotypic clusters. Meta-community analyses revealed five ecological zones throughout the global ocean, including two distinct Arctic regions. Across the zones, local and global patterns and drivers in viral community diversity were established for both macrodiversity (inter-population diversity) and microdiversity (intra-population genetic variation). These patterns sometimes, but not always, paralleled those from macro-organisms and revealed temperate and tropical surface waters and the Arctic as biodiversity hotspots and mechanistic hypotheses to explain them. Such further understanding of ocean viruses is critical for broader inclusion in ecosystem models.

Subfields: Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1264f6a75b064e7e914446f2ec364a2722a5748d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

Citations in the corpus

VIBRANT: automated recovery, annotation and curation of microbial viruses, and evaluation of viral community function from genomic sequences (2020, methodology): “Verification using GOV2 (Global Ocean Vir-omes 2.0) [76] and Human Gut Virome databases supported our finding that prnA appears to be constrained to aquatic environments, which is further supported by the gene ’ s presence on several marine cyanophages.”
PHROG: families of prokaryotic virus proteins clustered using remote homology (2021, background): “Viral genomes and metagenomes highlight (i) the recurrent presence of virus groups, especially in similar ecosystems, recently termed ‘virus operational taxonomic units’ (vOTUs; 5), (ii) the large number of different vOTUs found in most ecosystems (4) and (iii) the dominance in most vOTUs of genes n”
VIRIDIC—A Novel Tool to Calculate the Intergenomic Similarities of Prokaryote-Infecting Viruses (2020, background): “For example, several metagenomic studies grouped viral contigs into populations using an ANI of >95% over at least 80% of their genes [29,30].”
IMG/VR v3: an integrated ecological and evolutionary framework for interrogating genomes of uncultivated viruses (2020, methodology): “Published UViGs not in IMG were obtained from the Global Ocean Virome 2 dataset (36), the Gut Virome Database (37), and the Metagenomic Gut Viruses dataset.”