Plant genomes enclose footprints of past infections by giant virus relatives

Florian Maumus (), Aline Epert, Fabien Nogué and Guillaume Blanc ()
Additional contact information
Florian Maumus: INRA, UR1164 URGI—Research Unit in Genomics-Info, INRA de Versailles-Grignon, Route de Saint-Cyr
Aline Epert: INRA, UMR1318 INRA—AgroParisTech, INRA de Versailles-Grignon, Route de Saint-Cyr
Fabien Nogué: INRA, UMR1318 INRA—AgroParisTech, INRA de Versailles-Grignon, Route de Saint-Cyr
Guillaume Blanc: Laboratoire Information Structurale and Génomique, UMR7256 CNRS, Aix-Marseille Université

Nature Communications, 2014, vol. 5, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Nucleocytoplasmic large DNA viruses (NCLDVs) are eukaryotic viruses with large genomes (100 kb–2.5 Mb), which include giant Mimivirus, Megavirus and Pandoravirus. NCLDVs are known to infect animals, protists and phytoplankton but were never described as pathogens of land plants. Here, we show that the bryophyte Physcomitrella patens and the lycophyte Selaginella moellendorffii have open reading frames (ORFs) with high phylogenetic affinities to NCLDV homologues. The P. patens genes are clustered in DNA stretches (up to 13 kb) containing up to 16 NCLDV-like ORFs. Molecular evolution analysis suggests that the NCLDV-like regions were acquired by horizontal gene transfer from distinct but closely related viruses that possibly define a new family of NCLDVs. Transcriptomics and DNA methylation data indicate that the NCLDV-like regions are transcriptionally inactive and are highly cytosine methylated through a mechanism not relying on small RNAs. Altogether, our data show that members of NCLDV have infected land plants.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms5268 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:5:y:2014:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms5268

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

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms5268

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 ().