High Diversity of the Viral Community from an Antarctic Lake
Shivering Viromes
Despite its icy reputation, freshwater ponds and lakes do occur in Antarctica, and open freshwater can be found for a few brief weeks during the austral summer. The ecology of these lakes is, as expected, rather specialized to cope with the extreme seasonal conditions. In a metagenomic study, López-Bueno et al. (p. 858) inspected the virus community of Lake Limnopolar on Livingston Island and found an unexpectedly rich genetic diversity. A dominant group of previously unidentified single-stranded DNA viruses was found, and a striking shift after ice-melt in spring from single-stranded to double-stranded DNA viruses was observed, probably as their algal hosts started to bloom with increasing daylight hours. The diverse viruses may donate specialized genes that host organisms can also exploit to aid their survival under winter extremes of heat and light deprivation.
Abstract
Viruses are the most abundant biological entities and can control microbial communities, but their identity in terrestrial and freshwater Antarctic ecosystems is unknown. The genetic structure of an Antarctic lake viral community revealed unexpected genetic richness distributed across the highest number of viral families that have been found to date in aquatic viral metagenomes. In contrast to other known aquatic viromes, which are dominated by bacteriophage sequences, this Antarctic virus assemblage had a large proportion of sequences related to eukaryotic viruses, including phycodnaviruses and single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) viruses not previously identified in aquatic environments. We also observed that the transition from an ice-covered lake in spring to an open-water lake in summer led to a change from a ssDNA– to a double-stranded DNA–virus-dominated assemblage, possibly reflecting a seasonal shift in host organisms.
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Published In
Science
Volume 326 | Issue 5954
6 November 2009
6 November 2009
Copyright
Copyright © 2009, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 17 July 2009
Accepted: 3 September 2009
Published in print: 6 November 2009
Acknowledgments
We thank the Maritime Technology Unit (CSIC) and Las Palmas crew (Spanish Navy) for the logistic help and support that made this expedition possible. We also thank M. Toro, A. Camacho, and other members of the Limnopolar Project for help and discussions; A. Alejo for helpful comments and reviewing the manuscript; and M. Pignatelli for technical support. This work was funded by grants from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (CGL2005-06549-C02-01/ANT, CGL2007-29843-E/ANT, CTM2008-05134-E/ANT, and BFU2008-04501-E). Spring and summer viral metagenomes from the Antarctic Lake Limnopolar have been submitted to GenBank and assigned the genome project accession number 34669. The metagenomes are also publicly accessible from the ftp server of the SEED public database (ftp://ftp.theseed.org/metagenomes) under the project accession numbers 4441778.3 and 4441558.3 for the spring and summer viromes, respectively. PCR-obtained sequences encoding the gp23 protein of Antarctic T4-phages and the MCP protein of Antarctic phycodnavirus have been also deposited at GenBank as “environmental sequences” and are listed under accession numbers FJ791185-247 and FJ791175-84, respectively.
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- Biodiversity and distribution of polar freshwater DNA viruses, Science Advances, 1, 5, (2015)./doi/10.1126/sciadv.1400127
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