Ecological impacts and drivers of double-stranded DNA viral communities in the global oceans

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Ocean microbes produce half of the oxygen that humans breath and drive much of the energy and nutrient transformations that fuel ocean ecosystems. Viruses of microbes alter these microbial impacts through mortality, moving genes from one organism to another, and reprogramming a host cell's metabolism during infection. However, current understanding of ocean viruses is limited to just a few specific model systems or study sites. This project will produce a foundational dataset - the Global Ocean Virome (GOV) - for contextualizing newly discovered viruses, and use this dataset to evaluate the environmental conditions that structure viral communities or how viral communities change over time and space. Additionally, the project will illuminate 'viral dark matter' by experimentally identifying viral structural proteins and generating and investigating single-cell genomic datasets to link novel and abundant viruses to their host cells. The project will train 6 researchers, as well as lead to curriculum, seminars and a public exhibit at The Wellington School and the Columbus Center Of Science and Industry that will together reach approximately 500 students and 250,000 members of the public.The GOV dataset is comprised of 104 viral metagenomes from around the world's surface and deep oceans. This project seeks to analyze the GOV to identify and quantify viral populations globally, then evaluate these data for ecological patterns to determine the ecological drivers of surface and deep ocean viral community structure. These patterns and drivers will be interpreted in the context of (i) viral metaproteomic experiments to maximally annotate unknown viral proteins that are structural, (ii) paired microbial sequence datasets (metagenomes and metatranscriptomes) that will enable assessment of how biotic factors impact viral community structure and (iii) single-cell amplified genomes and phageFISH experiments that will enable identification of hosts for abundant and novel viruses identified in the GOV. In total, this project will further optimize recently developed genome- and population-based viral ecology methods to establish a first available global map of surface and deep ocean viral populations from both free viromes and infected microbes. These analyses will help evaluate and establish myriad hypotheses about viral roles in marine microbial ecology and biogeochemistry, and the dataset will be a foundational resource for microbial and viral ecologists to contextualize new viruses, identify viruses in microbial datasets, and explore virus-host interactions both phenomenologically and through ecosystem modeling. The GOV will be made publicly available through the NSF-funded iPlant Cyberinfrastructure and metaVIR (http://metavir-meb.univ-bpclermont.fr/).