An inside look at bathypelagic viruses

Abstract

Extensive research in surface ocean layers has demonstrated that viruses are significant components of marine microbial communities. But the dark ocean is the largest and the most unexplored habitat in the biosphere, comprising 1.3 X 1018 m3 (Arístegui, 2009). Accordingly, evaluating the role of viruses in the deep ocean remains an elusive, but pivotal underpinning of our growing understanding of the microbial oceanography of the open and dark oceans. We explored diversity of viral communities using 14 samples from 4,000 m collected during the Malaspina-2010 circumnavigation in the Atlantic and Pacific ocean and 5 samples from the bathypelagic layer (from 1,200 to 3,500 m) in the Mediterranean Sea collected during the Ocean Certain cruise to establish dsDNA viromes from viral-fraction (<0.22 μm)