Multiple origins of prokaryotic and eukaryotic single-stranded DNA viruses from bacterial and archaeal plasmids

Darius Kazlauskas, Arvind Varsani, Eugene V. Koonin and Mart Krupovic ()
Additional contact information
Darius Kazlauskas: Vilnius University
Arvind Varsani: Arizona State University
Eugene V. Koonin: National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine. National Institutes of Health
Mart Krupovic: Institut Pasteur

Nature Communications, 2019, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-12

Abstract: Abstract Single-stranded (ss) DNA viruses are a major component of the earth virome. In particular, the circular, Rep-encoding ssDNA (CRESS-DNA) viruses show high diversity and abundance in various habitats. By combining sequence similarity network and phylogenetic analyses of the replication proteins (Rep) belonging to the HUH endonuclease superfamily, we show that the replication machinery of the CRESS-DNA viruses evolved, on three independent occasions, from the Reps of bacterial rolling circle-replicating plasmids. The CRESS-DNA viruses emerged via recombination between such plasmids and cDNA copies of capsid genes of eukaryotic positive-sense RNA viruses. Similarly, the rep genes of prokaryotic DNA viruses appear to have evolved from HUH endonuclease genes of various bacterial and archaeal plasmids. Our findings also suggest that eukaryotic polyomaviruses and papillomaviruses with dsDNA genomes have evolved via parvoviruses from CRESS-DNA viruses. Collectively, our results shed light on the complex evolutionary history of a major class of viruses revealing its polyphyletic origins.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11433-0 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:10:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-019-11433-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-11433-0

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().