Hidden diversity of soil giant viruses

Frederik Schulz (), Lauren Alteio, Danielle Goudeau, Elizabeth M. Ryan, Feiqiao B. Yu, Rex R. Malmstrom, Jeffrey Blanchard () and Tanja Woyke ()
Additional contact information
Frederik Schulz: Joint Genome Institute
Lauren Alteio: University of Massachusetts
Danielle Goudeau: Joint Genome Institute
Elizabeth M. Ryan: Joint Genome Institute
Feiqiao B. Yu: Stanford University
Rex R. Malmstrom: Joint Genome Institute
Jeffrey Blanchard: University of Massachusetts
Tanja Woyke: Joint Genome Institute

Nature Communications, 2018, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract Known giant virus diversity is currently skewed towards viruses isolated from aquatic environments and cultivated in the laboratory. Here, we employ cultivation-independent metagenomics and mini-metagenomics on soils from the Harvard Forest, leading to the discovery of 16 novel giant viruses, chiefly recovered by mini-metagenomics. The candidate viruses greatly expand phylogenetic diversity of known giant viruses and either represented novel lineages or are affiliated with klosneuviruses, Cafeteria roenbergensis virus or tupanviruses. One assembled genome with a size of 2.4 Mb represents the largest currently known viral genome in the Mimiviridae, and others encode up to 80% orphan genes. In addition, we find more than 240 major capsid proteins encoded on unbinned metagenome fragments, further indicating that giant viruses are underexplored in soil ecosystems. The fact that most of these novel viruses evaded detection in bulk metagenomes suggests that mini-metagenomics could be a valuable approach to unearth viral giants.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07335-2 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:9:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-018-07335-2

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

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-07335-2

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 ().