According to a study, several of the 5,500 species of marine RNA viruses recently discovered by scientists may help drive carbon absorbed from the atmosphere into permanent storage on the ocean floor.
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The findings also show that a small number of these newly discovered species have “borrowed” DNA from infected animals, which could help researchers determine their supposed hosts and functions in marine processes.
Greater understanding
Research leads to a better understanding of the disproportionate impact these small particles have on the ocean environment, as well as tracing a wealth of basic ecological data.
“The findings are critical to building models and anticipating what is happening to carbon in the right direction and at the right scale,” said Ahmed Zayed, co-author of the paper and a scientific researcher in microbiology at State University. ‘Ohio.
When considering the vastness of the ocean, the issue of size is a crucial concern.
Ohio State University professor of microbiology Matthew Sullivan plans to discover viruses that, when created on a large scale, can act as programmable “shackles” in a biological pump that controls how carbon is deposited in the ocean.
“We are becoming more and more aware that we may need to adjust the pump to the scale of the ocean,” he said. Sullivan says society is based on this technological care, but it is difficult to solve.
Science published the study online.
Read also: Data show that carbon dioxide levels are on record
Damage assessment
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These RNA viruses were discovered in plankton samples collected by the Tara Oceans Consortium, a global study of the impact of climate change on the ocean conducted aboard the schooner Tara. The international effort aims to learn more about the mysterious organisms that live in the sea and do most of the work of absorbing half of the man-made carbon into the atmosphere and producing half of the oxygen it produces. we breathe to predict how the ocean will respond. to climate change.
While these marine viral species are not harmful to humans, they function like all viruses, infecting another creature and exploiting their cellular machinery to replicate. While the consequence can always be dangerous for the host, the actions of a virus can have environmental benefits, such as helping to disperse a bloom of toxic algae.
The key to determining its place in the ecosystem has been the development of computational approaches that can extract information about RNA virus activities and hosts from small segments of the genome using genomics standards.
Guillermo Dominguez-Huerta, a former postdoctoral researcher at Sullivan’s lab, commented: “Let the data be our guide.”
The team used 44,000 sequence statistical analysis to classify RNA virus communities into four ecological zones: Arctic, Antarctic, temperate, and tropical epipelagic (closest to the surface, where photosynthesis occurs), and temperate mesopelagic. tropical (mostly relative to the surface, where photosynthesis occurs) (200-1,000 meters deep). These zones are similar to the zone designations for the nearly 200,000 species of marine DNA viruses previously found by researchers.
There were some unexpected results. Although biodiversity tends to increase near the equator and decrease near the poles, Zayed said a network-based ecological interaction study revealed that the variety of RNA virus species in the Arctic and ‘Antarctica was higher than expected.
“Viruses don’t care about temperature when it comes to variety,” he said. “The great variety we see in polar places is great because we have more viral species competing for the same host. We observe fewer host species but more viral species infecting the same animals,” says the researcher.
Identification of the hosts
To identify potential hosts, the researchers used a combination of methods, first deducing the host from the categorization of viruses in the context of marine plankton and then generating predictions based on how the amounts of viruses and hosts would “incubate” as their abundances depend. one on top of the other. Finding evidence of RNA virus incorporation into cell genomes was the third technique.
“The viruses we are investigating are not inserted into the host genome, but many do so by mistake, which is a clue about the host because if you discover a viral signal within a host genome, it means that the The virus was inside the cell at some point, “Dominguez-Huerta said.
Although most dsDNA viruses infect bacteria and archaea, which are widespread in the ocean, this recent study found that RNA viruses primarily infect fungi and eukaryotes and microbial invertebrates to a lesser extent. Only a small percentage of marine RNA viruses can infect bacteria.
The researchers also discovered 72 functionally different metabolic auxiliary (AMG) genes splattered between 95 RNA viruses. These provided some of the best clues as to what types of organisms infect these viruses and what metabolic processes they are trying to reprogram to maximize the “making” of viruses in the ocean.
Subsequent research
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More network-based research found 1,243 species of RNA viruses linked to carbon exports, and it was suggested that 11 were active in facilitating the export of carbon to the ocean floor. Two viruses connected to algae hosts were chosen as the most promising targets for further research.
“We’re getting to the point where we can create metabolic maps from bags of genes,” says Dr. Richard Sullivan, an associate professor of biogeoscience.
Sullivan, Dominguez-Huerta, and Zayed are members of the EMERGE Biology Integration Institute in the state of Ohio.
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