Biodiversity and distribution of polar freshwater DNA viruses

• Published in: Science Advances
• Main Authors: Aguirre de Cárcer, Daniel, López-Bueno, Alberto, Pearce, David A., Alcamí, Antonio
• Other Authors: Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (España), Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship, CSIC - Patronato Santiago Ramón y Cajal de Ciencias Naturales y Médicas, CSIC - Unidad de Recursos de Información Científica para la Investigación (URICI)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: American Association for the Advancement of Science 2015
• Subjects: Antarctic; Arctic; Arctic Ocean; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10261/123183; https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1400127; https://doi.org/10.13039/501100003329

Viruses constitute the most abundant biological entities and a large reservoir of genetic diversity on Earth. Despite the recent surge in their study, our knowledge on their actual biodiversity and distribution remains sparse. We report the first metagenomic analysis of Arctic freshwater viral DNA communities and a comparative analysis with other freshwater environments. Arctic viromes are dominated by unknown and single-stranded DNA viruses with no close relatives in the database. These unique viral DNA communities mostly relate to each other and present some minor genetic overlap with other environments studied, including an Arctic Ocean virome. Despite common environmental conditions in polar ecosystems, the Arctic and Antarctic DNA viromes differ at the fine-grain genetic level while sharing a similar taxonomic composition. The study uncovers some viral lineages with a bipolar distribution, suggesting a global dispersal capacity for viruses, and seemingly indicates that viruses do not follow the latitudinal diversity gradient known for macroorganisms. Our study sheds light into the global biogeography and connectivity of viral communities. This work was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness grant CTM2011-15091-E/ANT. D.A.d.C. was supported by the Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship grant PIIF-GA-2012-328287, and A.L.-B. was supported by a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship (RYC-2010-06300). We acknowledge support of the publication fee by the CSIC Open Access Publication Support Initiative through its Unit of Information Resources for Research (URICI) Peer reviewed