Soil Viruses Are Underexplored Players in Ecosystem Carbon Processing

• Published in: mSystems
• Main Authors: Trubl, Gareth, Jang, Ho Bin, Roux, Simon, Emerson, Joanne B., Solonenko, Natalie, Vik, Dean R., Solden, Lindsey, Ellenbogen, Jared, Runyon, Alexander T., Bolduc, Benjamin, Woodcroft, Ben J., Saleska, Scott R., Tyson, Gene W., Wrighton, Kelly C., Sullivan, Matthew B., Rich, Virginia I.
• Other Authors: Bordenstein, Seth, U.S. Department of Energy, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: American Society for Microbiology 2018
• Subjects: Emerson; permafrost
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1128/msystems.00076-18; https://journals.asm.org/doi/pdf/10.1128/mSystems.00076-18

This work is part of a 10-year project to examine thawing permafrost peatlands and is the first virome-particle-based approach to characterize viruses in these systems. This method yielded >2-fold-more viral populations (vOTUs) per gigabase of metagenome than vOTUs derived from bulk-soil metagenomes from the same site (J. B. Emerson, S. Roux, J. R. Brum, B. Bolduc, et al., Nat Microbiol 3:870–880, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-018-0190-y ). We compared the ecology of the recovered vOTUs along a permafrost thaw gradient and found (i) habitat specificity, (ii) a shift in viral community identity from soil-like to aquatic-like viruses, (iii) infection of dominant microbial hosts, and (iv) carriage of host metabolic genes. These vOTUs can impact ecosystem carbon processing via top-down (inferred from lysing dominant microbial hosts) and bottom-up (inferred from carriage of auxiliary metabolic genes) controls. This work serves as a foundation which future studies can build upon to increase our understanding of the soil virosphere and how viruses affect soil ecosystem services.