Title: Towards a comprehensive global oceans catalog of viral 'auxiliary metabolic genes'
Abstract: Ocean microbes have impacted Earth’s biogeochemistry for billions of years, but they do so in concert with viruses that lyse them and directly manipulate their metabolisms via virus-encoded auxiliary metabolic genes (AMGs). Viral AMGs reduce metabolic bottlenecks to virus production during infection, and impact diverse metabolism. Here we catalog viral AMGs throughout 86 paired Tara Oceans 'viral' and 'prokaryote' metagenomes and use these to establish baseline pathway, and evolutionary context. This revealed 823 microbial metabolic pathways, which represents 78% of MetaCyc-known pathways and 10 MetaCyc-defined metabolic processes. Against this, we identified 279 virus-encoded AMGs (103 novel), which included at least one virus-encoded AMG across 90 pathways (11 single-gene, 75 multi-gene and 4 virus-exclusive pathways). Metabolically, 8 pathways, associated with glycolysis, biosynthesis of nucleotides, amino acids, and energy metabolism through electron transfer, were AMG hot spots. Evolutionarily, 40% of the AMGs had identifiable microbial 'sources', with Proteobacteria, Bacteriodetes, and Cyanobacteria the most common (n=135, 16, 14, respectively). Together these data more than double known AMGs and provide a systematic, well-contextualized ocean AMGs catalog for future efforts to model ocean metabolisms.
This is joint work with Funing Tian, Aria Hahn, Consuelo Gazitua, Ahmed Zayed, Cristina Howard-Varona, Ben Bolduc, Simon Roux, Steven Hallam and Matthew B. Sullivan
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Video: https://osu.box.com/s/68tg4hyfrl77ala2wthvgg7lzlueiq10