Ocean-dominating viruses have been discovered by scientists

Researchers have uncovered viruses that covertly control the waters throughout the planet.

RNA viruses can infect influential ocean species.

 

Scientists have stated that thousands of unknown viruses just discovered hiding in the world's oceans may have a significant impact on the ecosystems, partly by "reprogramming" the hosts they infect. This discovery was made very recently.

 

The latest study, released this past Thursday (June 9) in the journal Science, focuses on viruses made up of RNA, a DNA molecular relative. In human disease, there are many examples of RNA viruses; for instance, coronaviruses and influenza viruses are both composed of RNA. However, when it comes to the RNA viruses found in the water, researchers are just beginning to learn about the many kinds of hosts they may infect and the variety of hosts they can find.

 

According to co-first author Guillermo Dominguez-Huerta, who was a postdoctoral scholar in viral ecology at Ohio State University (OSU) at the time the study was conducted, "we are certainly sure that most RNA viruses in the ocean are infecting microbial eukaryotes, such as fungi and protists, and to a lesser extent, invertebrates." This is based on the findings of the new study. Eukaryotes are organisms that have complex cells that house their genetic material within a nucleus. Eukaryotes are classified as living things.

 

These viral hosts, including fungi and protists, which include algae and amoebas, are responsible for the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and, as a result, have an impact on the amount of carbon that is eventually stored in the ocean. According to Steven Wilhelm, the principal investigator of the Aquatic Microbial Ecology Research Group at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, who was not involved in the new study, RNA viruses likely affect how carbon moves through the ocean by infecting these organisms. Wilhelm was not a part of the research team that conducted the new study.

 

Wilhelm stated in an email to Live Science that "given the quantity of RNA virus particles, knowing they can do this continues to develop the tale of how significant viruses are in the world with respect to how energy and carbon flow."

 

(Wilhelm has worked on projects unrelated to the new study with a number of the authors of the study, including Matthew Sullivan and Alexander Culley.)

 

Viruses, everywhere

 

At the beginning of this year, Dominguez-Huerta and his colleagues reported discovering more than 5,500 RNA viruses in the waters of the world that had not been discovered before.

 

An ongoing global study examining the impact of climate change on the oceans is being conducted by the Tara Oceans Consortium. For this particular study, published on April 7 in the journal Science, the research team analyzed 35,000 water samples collected from 121 locations across all five oceans. These water samples were teeming with plankton, microscopic organisms that float through the water and are frequently used as hosts for RNA viruses. For the researchers to identify the viruses hiding within these phytoplanktons, they combed through all of the RNA that was present in the cells of the phytoplankton in search of a particular segment of genetic code known as the RdRp gene.

 

Dominguez-Huerta, who presently works as a scientific consultant with a company named Virosphaera, stated that "it's the sole coding sequence that is consistent across all RNA viruses." Despite this, the RdRp gene is not present in cells or other types of viruses.

 

In the end, the group discovered so many RNA viruses hidden away in the plankton that they advocated increasing the number of RNA virus species, which is the wide taxonomic category just below "kingdom," from five to ten to categorize all of the viruses they discovered properly.

 

From that point on, the researchers sought to gain a deeper understanding of how these viruses are disseminated across the world and the hosts they prey upon.

 

The researchers concluded that the viral communities could be divided into four distinct regions: the arctic, the antarctic, the temperate and tropical epipelagic, which means close to the ocean surface, and the temperate and tropical mesopelagic, which means approximately 656 to 3,280 feet (200 to 1,000 meters) underwater. Interestingly, the variety of viruses seems to be greatest in the polar regions, despite the fact that warmer seas have a broader range of animals for viruses to infect.

 

According to Ahmed Zayed, a research scientist in the Department of Microbiology at Oregon State University and a co-first author of the study, "Viruses, when it comes to diversity, don't care about how cold the water is." According to Zayed, who works for Live Science, this discovery proves that several viruses presumably compete for the same hosts at the poles.

 

The research group utilized a variety of approaches to identify the viral hosts. For instance, one method involved comparing the genomes of RNA viruses that were previously discovered to those of the newly discovered viruses. Another method involved searching for rare snippets of viral RNA in the genomes of host cells, a location where bits of RNA can sometimes get left behind. According to the findings of this study, the majority of the RNA viruses found in the ocean infect fungi and protists. In contrast, some infect invertebrates, and just a small percentage infect bacteria.

 

According to Dominguez-Huerta, the scientists made another surprise discovery in which they found that 95 of the viruses carried genes that they had "taken" from their host cells. These genes play an important role in directing metabolic activities occurring within the host cell. The authors concluded based on this discovery that the viruses likely tampered with the metabolisms of their hosts in some way, most likely to increase the number of new virus particles produced.

 

Dominguez-Huerta pointed out that earlier research on a more limited scale had provided some hints regarding the capability of gene swapping.

 

After determining what hosts the ocean viruses most likely infect, the team concluded that approximately 1,200 of the viruses might be involved in carbon export. Carbon export refers to the process by which carbon is extracted from the atmosphere, incorporated into marine organisms, and then "exported" to the deep sea as those organisms sink to the seafloor after dying.

 

According to the research conducted by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, the greater the depth to which these carbon stocks sink, the longer it is likely that they will be kept in the ocean before being cycled back into the atmosphere. Because of this, carbon export is a significant factor that scientists include in their climate change models. New research suggests that because viruses change the cellular activity of the hosts they infect, the infection of marine organisms by RNA viruses may be an additional, previously unacknowledged factor driving ocean carbon flux. This is because RNA viruses cause infections in marine organisms.

 

Since viruses often burst out of their hosts after rapidly duplicating inside them, Wilhelm claimed that RNA viruses might drive carbon flow by tearing their hosts open and spewing sequestered carbon into the ocean. This is because viruses rapidly replicate inside their hosts.

Article source : https://www.livescience.com/marine-rna-viruses-function

Image source   : https://pixabay.com/id/photos/kebersihan-merokok-disinfeksi-7261644/

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