Metagenomics Reveals a Novel Virophage Population in a Tibetan Mountain Lake - PubMed (original) (raw)

Metagenomics Reveals a Novel Virophage Population in a Tibetan Mountain Lake

Seungdae Oh et al. Microbes Environ. 2016.

Abstract

Virophages are parasites of giant viruses that infect eukaryotic organisms and may affect the ecology of inland water ecosystems. Despite the potential ecological impact, limited information is available on the distribution, diversity, and hosts of virophages in ecosystems. Metagenomics revealed that virophages were widely distributed in inland waters with various environmental characteristics including salinity and nutrient availability. A novel virophage population was overrepresented in a planktonic microbial community of the Tibetan mountain lake, Lake Qinghai. Our study identified coccolithophores and coccolithovirus-like phycodnaviruses in the same community, which may serve as eukaryotic and viral hosts of the virophage population, respectively.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Fig. 1

Fig. 1

Occurrence and diversity of virophage populations in diverse terrestrial aquatic environments. The phylogenetic tree was built based on the maximum likelihood method with the Jones-Taylor-Thornton model using MEGA 6.0 (25). Bootstrap support values (higher than 50) from 100 replicates are shown on the nodes of the tree. The three lineages (Lineages I, II, and III) that were not closely related to the previously characterized virophages were highlighted.

Fig. 2

Fig. 2

Circular map of the Qinghai Lake virophage (QLV) genome. Inwards: ORFs of the two DNA strands (red, blue, and black representing core, specific, and others, respectively) and G+C content. Protein-coding genes on the genome were predicted using GeneMark.hmm with the heuristic model (4). The protein-coding genes were functionally annotated by searching the amino acid sequences against the non-redundant protein database (nr) and metagenomic protein (env_nr) database, respectively, using BLASTp with >30% amino acid identity and >50% query length coverage.

Similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Adriaenssens E.M., Van Zyl L., De Maayer P., Rubagotti E., Rybicki E., Tuffin M., Cowan D.A. Metagenomic analysis of the viral community in Namib Desert hypoliths. Environ Microbiol. 2014;17:480–495. - PubMed
    1. Altschup S.F., Gish W., Miller W., Myers E.W., Lipman D.J. Basic local alignment search tool. J Mol Biol. 1990;215:403–410. - PubMed
    1. Bamford D.H., Grimes J.M., Stuart D.I. What does structure tell us about virus evolution? Curr Opin Struct Biol. 2005;15:655–663. - PubMed
    1. Besemer J., Borodovsky M. Heuristic approach to deriving models for gene finding. Nucleic Acids Res. 1999;27:3911–3920. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Desnues C., Boyer M., Raoult D. Sputnik, a virophage infecting the viral domain of life. Adv Virus Res. 2012;82:63–89. - PubMed

MeSH terms

LinkOut - more resources