The microbes that cycle nutrients in the ocean don’t do the work on their own – the viruses that infect them also influence the process.
The microbes that cycle nutrients in the ocean don’t do the work on their own – the viruses that infect them also influence the process. It’s a vital job for the rest of the planet, enabling oceans to absorb half of the human-generated carbon in the atmosphere and produce half of the oxygen we breathe.
A new study gets scientists closer to more fully understanding where viruses fit into the global ocean picture of cycling nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorous and, of particular interest, carbon. The research broadly expands on a 20-year-old finding that genes can be exchanged between viruses and the photosynthetic cells they infect and consolidates data resulting from more than 100 papers on viruses and metabolism that followed.
The research team, led by The Ohio State University, reports in the journal Microbiome on its creation of a catalog of genes that viruses “stole” from the marine microbes they infected across all of the world’s oceans. Scientists identified and organized almost 23,000 genes known as auxiliary metabolic genes (AMGs), including over 7,000 never previously documented. The analysis suggests that about 1 in 5 ocean virus populations carries at least one AMG.
Read More: Ohio State University
Photo Credit: Mapswire via Pixabay
