Award: OCE-1435868

New paradigms for virus-host interactions in the ocean.

Taken together, the work funded by this grant substantially improves our understanding of how viruses and their hosts interact in the marine environment.

We shed light on viral ‘dark matter’ by discovering and characterizing a novel group of tailless viruses that are major unrecognized predators of diverse phyla of marine bacteria. A freely available version of this publication, including images of these new viruses, which we named the Autolykiviridae, and how we isolated them, ananlyzed their genomes and found related viruses in other bacteria and in the oceans is linked here: http://rdcu.be/FtHL. Taken together, our work suggests that double jelly roll lineage tailless dsDNA viruses like the Autolykiviridae impose fundamentally different predation and gene transfer regimes on microbial systems than tailed viruses, which form the basis of all environmental models of bacteria-virus interactions. More broadly, we have preliminary evidence that related tailless viruses exist in other environments, such as the human gut. Based on our work, the scientific community can now better identify, isolate, and compare the ecological roles of these viruses in marine and non-marine environments.

In asking how viruses survive in the marine environment we have shown for the first time that closely related viruses in the same environment can use numerous, co-existing, strategies to attack closely related bacteria. As part of our efforts we have provided to the community a set of ~250 virus genomes associated with sequenced host genomes, representing the largest available culture collection of marine virus-host pairs (all data is freely available via the NCBI Bioproject database: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject/328102). This unprecedented collection viruses of marine Vibrionaceae includes representatives of major marine viral groups, including the three Caudovirales tailed virus morphotypes, the Autolykiviridae, and the smallest (10,046 bp) and largest (348,911 bp) Vibrio virus genomes described.

The Nahant collection of viruses and hosts provides a unique resource for the study of the ecology and evolution of microbial systems and we anticipate that it will be of great value to the marine microbiology community, and to the broader set of researchers focused on virus evolution and genomics.

 

Last Modified: 05/30/2018
Modified by: Libusha Kelly