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After traveling the world and sampling the ocean from pole to pole, scientists have uncovered nearly 200,000 populations of marine viruses.
In the marine ecosystem, tiny living organisms called microbes make up the bulk of the ocean's biodiversity and more than half of its biomass. But much less is known about viruses – packets of genetic information that replicate inside other living things – that exist in the oceans. Scientists have undertaken to study the marine viral community, its diversity and function, especially its impact on microbes. On Thursday, they announced the creation of a vast global catalog of marine viruses, marking a milestone in the response to many of these issues.
"This expands our knowledge of biological entities on our planet," said Gizmodo Ann Gregory, study author and postdoctoral researcher at VIB-KU Leuven in Belgium.
The data comes from 146 samples taken from several expeditions aboard the schooner Tara, including 41 samples during a trip in the Arctic Ocean in 2013. Researchers first had to determine whether the genetic material in the sample was viral or not, with various bioinformatic tools comparing it to known viruses, said the study's co-author, Ahmed Zayed, a graduate student in the study. Ohio State University. Then, they compare the strands of DNA to each other in order to divide them into viral populations.
The analysis revealed 195,728 virus populations, 12 times more than the previous analysis on a smaller Tara dataset, according to the paper published in Cell. Further examination revealed that these populations appear to be divided into five meta-communities, which researchers call ecological zones: Arctic; Antarctic; deeper than 2,000 meters; 150 to 1,000 meters; and temperate / tropical waters with depths ranging from 0 to 150 meters. Perhaps surprisingly, latitude has not predicted viral diversity.
It's an exciting job. Microbes are perhaps the main drivers of the ocean's biochemical processes, and microbes are infected with viruses. "I think people are aware that viral diversity far exceeds that of the vast microbial diversity," said Gizmodo Alison Buchan, a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. "But few studies have attempted to quantify the extent of this diversity."
What are you doing with such a large data set? You mainly do research to try to better understand the roles of all these viruses. Just as the rabies virus can increase the aggression of an infected animal to facilitate transmission, it is possible that some of these viruses play an important role in the chemical processes of the ocean. Many of them also cause the death of microbes. And maybe this vast new genetic information base contains something that will be useful to the man.
"Maybe you can exploit new genes," Gregory said. Researchers will be able to discover new antibiotics using this genetic information.
This dataset is certainly not exhaustive, warned Gregory and Zayed. It only includes viruses containing DNA, rather than those containing RNA (in simple terms, the DNA is composed of a pair of complementary strands of material genetic, while RNA is composed of only one strand). Buchan also noted that it was more of a snapshot. Six months later, they may have obtained different results, she said.
This research is a wonderful reminder that, even though we know life on Earth, the oceans remain full of unknowns.
Selected photo: Tara Ocean
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