Study identifies more than 1,200 RNA viruses with connections to carbon flux
OHIO State University
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Dive In Scientists recently identified 5,500 marine RNA viruses have found that some can help promote carbon absorbed from the atmosphere to permanent storage on the ocean floor.
The analysis also shows that a small fraction of these newly identified species have “stealed” genes from the organisms they infect, helping the researchers identify their putative hosts and functions in these organisms. marine process.
In addition to mapping a basic trove of ecological data, the study leads to a more complete understanding of the role these tiny particles play in ocean ecosystems.
“These findings are important for model development and for predicting what is happening with carbon in the right direction and with a degree of accuracy,” Ahmed Zayeda research scientist in microbiology at Ohio State University and was the study’s first co-author.
The question of magnitude is a matter of serious consideration when taking into account the vastness of the ocean.
Main author Matthew SullivanAn Ohio State professor of microbiology, envisions identifying viruses that, when engineered on a large scale, could act as controllable “push buttons” on a biological pump. Science affects how carbon in the ocean is stored.
“As humans put more carbon into the atmosphere, we are depending on the ocean’s enormous buffering capacity to slow climate change. We are becoming more and more aware that we may need to tune the pump at the ocean scale,” says Sullivan.
“We are interested in viruses that can tune to a more digestible carbon, allowing the system to grow, making cells that get bigger and bigger and sink. And if it sinks, we’ll be a few hundred or a thousand years more from the worst effects of climate change.
“I think society is basically looking to that kind of technological fix, but it’s a complex fundamental science problem that needs to be analyzed.”
The study appears online today (June 9, 2022) in Science.
These RNA viruses were detected in plankton samples collected by Tara Oceans Consortiuman ongoing global study of motorists Tara impacts of climate change on the oceans. An international effort to reliably predict how the ocean will respond to climate change by getting to know the mysterious creatures that live there and do most of the work absorbing half of the carbon released by the ocean. man-made in the atmosphere and produces half of the oxygen we breathe. .
Although these marine viruses pose no threat to human health, they act like all viruses, each infecting a different organism and using its cellular machinery to make copies. its own star. While the outcome can always be seen as bad for the host, viral activities can confer benefits for the environment – for example, helping to kill harmful algae.
The key to determining where they fit into the ecosystem is to have developed computational techniques that can gather information about RNA viruses’ functions and hosts from very small, genomically standard fragments. .
“We let the data guide us,” says first co-author Guillermo Dominguez-Huertaa former postdoctoral researcher in Sullivan’s lab.
Statistical analysis of 44,000 sequences revealed the viral community structural models that the team used to divide RNA virus communities into four ecoregions: Arctic, Antarctic, Temperate, and Tropical Epiphyte (closest to the surface, where photosynthesis occurs) and Temperate and Tropical Mesopotamia (200- 1,000 meters deep). These regions closely match the regional delineation for the nearly 200,000 marine DNA virus species that the researchers previously identified.
There are some surprises. While biodiversity tends to expand in warmer regions near the equator and decrease near the colder poles, Zayed said a network-based ecological interaction analysis revealed species diversity. RNA viruses were higher than expected in the Arctic and Antarctic.
“When it comes to diversity, viruses don’t care about temperature,” he said. “There are more obvious interactions between viruses and cell life in the polar regions. That tells us the high diversity we’re looking at in the polar regions is basically because we have more virus species competing for the same host. We see fewer host species but more virus species infecting the same host.”
The team used several methodological approaches to identify likely hosts, first inferring the host based on virus taxonomy in the context of marine plankton and then that makes predictions based on how the virus and host populations “co-variate” because their abundances depend on each other. A third strategy involves looking for evidence of RNA virus integration in the cellular genome.
“The viruses we are studying do not introduce themselves into the host genome, but many are integrated into the genome by accident. When it happens, it’s a host clue because if you find a virus signal in the host genome, it’s because at some point the virus was inside the cell,” said Dominguez-Huerta speak.
While most dsDNA viruses have been found to infect bacteria and archaea, which are abundant in the oceans, this new analysis shows that RNA viruses primarily infect fungi and eukaryotes and To a lesser extent, invertebrates. Only a small fraction of marine RNA viruses infect bacteria.
The analysis also yielded the unexpected finding of 72 functionally different auxiliary metabolizing genes (AMGs) sprinkled among 95 RNA viruses, providing some of the best clues as to what types of organisms this virus might contain. infection and the metabolism they’re trying to reprogram. to maximize virus “manufacturing” in the ocean.
Further network-based analysis identified 1,243 RNA virus species that are involved in carbon export, and very cautiously, 11 species are implied to be involved in promoting carbon exports to the seafloor. Among them, two host-related viruses in the algal family were selected as the most promising tracking targets.
Sullivan, also a professor of civil engineering, environment and geodesy and founding director of the State of Ohio Microbial Science Center.
“I’m envisioning us taking AMGs and having these viruses predicted to infect specific hosts to really dial up the metabolic map towards the carbon we need. It is through metabolic activity that we may need to act.”
Sullivan, Dominguez-Huerta and Zayed are also members of the group Institute for Biointegration EMERGE in the State of Ohio.
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Ohio Supercomputing Center, the Ohio State Center for Microbial Science, the Ramon-Areces Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, Solutions. Government of Laulima/NIAID and France Génomique. This work was also made possible by the unprecedented scientific and sampling efforts of the Tara Oceans Consortium, the nonprofit Tara Ocean Foundation, and its partners.
Other co-authors on the paper include James Wainaina, Jiarong Guo, Funing Tian, Akbar Adjie Pratama, Benjamin Bolduc, Mohamed Mohssen and Olivier Zablocki, all in Sullivan’s lab; Jens Kuhn of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Alexander Culley of Laval University; Erwan Delage, Damien Eveillard and Samuel Chaffron of the University of Nantes; Lionel Guidi of the Sorbonne University; Hiroyuki Ogata of Kyoto University; Chris Bowler of Ecole Normale Supérieure; Eric Karsenti of the European Laboratory of Molecular Biology for Research by Ecole Normale and Directors; and Eric Pelletier, Adriana Alberti, Jean-Marc Aury, Quentin Carradec, Corinne da Silva, Karine Labadie, Julie Poulain and Patrick Wincker of Genoscope.
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Contact:
Ahmed Zayed, [email protected]
Guillermo Dominguez-Huerta, [email protected]
Matthew Sullivan, [email protected] (Sullivan will travel June 6-18 with limited ability to respond to emails or phone interviews.)
Written by Emily Caldwell, [email protected]; 614-292-8152
JOURNEYS
Science
DOI
ARTICLE TITLE
Diversity and ecological footprint of global ocean RNA viruses
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
June 10, 2022
From EurekAlert!
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