Biodiversity of Aquatic Phage

噬菌体是杀死细菌的病毒，是地球上最丰富的生物实体。它们对全球碳、氮和磷的循环有重大影响。通过杀死特定的细菌宿主，噬菌体有助于维持微生物的多样性，它们是基因交换的主要渠道。此外，噬菌体是工业和生物技术应用中经济上重要的酶的主要来源。尽管它们对全球生态很重要，但对噬菌体生物多样性或生物地理学几乎一无所知，因为只有不到1%的噬菌体可以培养。因此，环境噬菌体群落是地球上最大的未开发的序列多样性储藏库之一。该项目将利用基因组测序来检查世界上所有主要水生环境中未培养噬菌体的多样性和分布。将确定环境中存在的噬菌体类型以及种群结构(即存在的不同噬菌体基因组的数量及其相对丰度)。将检查特定噬菌体序列的全球分布，以评估噬菌体在环境之间移动的程度；还将探索噬菌体之间的基因转移。这项工作将导致识别世界上最常见的噬菌体类型，并在主要水生系统中建立噬菌体种群模型。反过来，这些知识将使人们能够更好地预测环境将如何应对全球气候变化。通过比较不同水生环境中的噬菌体种群，可以得出控制环境噬菌体生物地理分布和生态因素的新范式。此外，该项目的结果将用于评估和扩展当前的噬菌体分类系统，这对科学界具有重要价值。生物技术行业感兴趣的酶也将在该项目中被识别和表征。最后，这项研究将导致对来自水环境的具有重要生物学意义的未培养噬菌体的完整基因组进行测序。本科生和研究生，包括一些代表人数不足的少数群体，将在这些学习过程中接受培训。

Phage, viruses that kill bacteria, are the most abundant biological entities on the planet. They have major influences on global carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous cycling. By killing specific bacterial hosts, phage help maintain microbial diversity and they are major conduits of genetic exchange. Additionally, phage are major sources of economically important enzymes for industrial and biotech applications. Despite their importance to global ecology, almost nothing is known about phage biodiversity or biogeography because less than 1% of them can be cultured. Therefore, environmental phage communities are one of the largest unexplored reservoirs of sequence diversity on the planet. This project will utilize genomic sequencing to examine the diversity and distribution of uncultured phage in all of the world's major aquatic environments. The types of phage present within an environment, as well as the population structure (i.e., the number of different phage genomes present and their relative abundances) will be determined. The global distribution of specific phage sequences will be examined in order to assess the extent of phage movement between environments; gene transfer among phage will also be explored. This work will lead to the identification of the world's most common phage types and produce population models of phage in major aquatic systems. In turn, this knowledge will allow for better predictions about how the environment will respond to global climate changes. Comparing phage populations from different aquatic environments will lead to new paradigms about the factors that govern the biogeographical distributions and ecology of environmental phage. In addition, results from this project will be used to evaluate and expand upon current phage taxonomy systems, which are of great value to the scientific community. Enzymes of interest to biotech industries will also be identified and characterized during this project. Finally, this research will result in the sequencing of complete genomes of biologically important uncultured phage from aquatic environments. Undergraduate and graduate students, including a number of underrepresented minorities, will receive training during the course of these studies.