Charting the diversity of uncultured viruses of Archaea and Bacteria

F. H. Coutinho, R. A. Edwards, F. Rodríguez-Valera

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

26 Citations (Scopus)
80 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Background: Viruses of Archaea and Bacteria are among the most abundant and diverse biological entities on Earth. Unraveling their biodiversity has been challenging due to methodological limitations. Recent advances in culture-independent techniques, such as metagenomics, shed light on the unknown viral diversity, revealing thousands of new viral nucleotide sequences at an unprecedented scale. However, these novel sequences have not been properly classified and the evolutionary associations between them were not resolved. Results: Here, we performed phylogenomic analysis of nearly 200,000 viral nucleotide sequences to establish GL-UVAB: Genomic Lineages of Uncultured Viruses of Archaea and Bacteria. The pan-genome content of the identified lineages shed light on some of their infection strategies, potential to modulate host physiology, and mechanisms to escape host resistance systems. Furthermore, using GL-UVAB as a reference database for annotating metagenomes revealed elusive habitat distribution patterns of viral lineages and environmental drivers of community composition. Conclusions: These findings provide insights about the genomic diversity and ecology of viruses of prokaryotes. The source code used in these analyses is freely available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/gluvab/.

Original languageEnglish
Article number109
Number of pages16
JournalBMC Biology
Volume17
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 29 Dec 2019
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

Keywords

  • Bacteriophages
  • Classification
  • Genomics
  • Metagenomics
  • Phylogenomics
  • Viruses

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