Prevalence of psbA-containing cyanobacterial podoviruses in the ocean.
Podoviruses that infect marine picocyanobacteria are abundant and could play a significant role on regulating host populations due to their specific phage-host relationship. Genome sequencing of cyanophages has unveiled that many marine cyanophages encode certain photosynthetic genes like psbA. It appears that psbA is only present in certain groups of cyanopodovirus isolates. In order to better understand the prevalence of psbA in cyanobacterial podoviruses, we searched the marine metagenomic database (GOS, BATS, HOT and MarineVirome). Our study suggests that 89% of recruited cyanopodovirus scaffolds from the GOS database contained the psbA gene, supporting the ecological relevance of the photosynthesis gene for surface oceanic cyanophages. Diversification between Clade A and B are consistent with recent finding of two major groups of cyanopodoviruses. All the data also shows that Clade B cyanopodoviruses dominate the surface ocean water, while Clade A cyanopodoviruses become more important in the coastal and estuarine environments.
State Key Laboratory for Marine Environmental Science, Institute of Marine Microbes and Ecospheres, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, People's Republic of China.
Qiang
Q
Zheng
Nianzhi
N
Jiao
Rui
R
Zhang
Feng
F
Chen
Curtis A
CA
Suttle
D001435:Bacteriophages / Q000235:genetics; D000458:Cyanobacteria / Q000235:genetics*; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D016679:Genome, Viral / Q000235:genetics; D056186:Metagenomics / Q000379:methods; D009792:Oceans and Seas; D045332:Photosystem II Protein Complex / Q000235:genetics*; D010802:Phylogeny; D017902:Podoviridae / Q000235:genetics*; D015995:Prevalence; D012623:Seawater / Q000382:microbiology* / Q000821:virology*
D045332:Photosystem II Protein Complex; C422369:photosystem II, psbA subunit