Document Type

Unpublished Material

Disciplines

Bioinformatics | Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology | Marine Biology | Virology

Abstract

Viral metabolic reprograming of marine prokaryotes, through the use of virally encoded auxiliary metabolic genes (AMGs), plays a critical role in marine ecosystem function by influencing biochemical cycles and genetic diversity in these environments. Despite the fundamental role viruses play in global environmental ecosystems, they remain an understudied aspect of microbial ecology and evolution, in part due to the methods available for studying virus host interactions in natural systems. Thus far, metagenomic analyses have been used to study the interactions of virus host pairs, but these types of analyses have their limitations in accurately linking viruses to hosts, or culture-based approaches, which are limited in their representation of natural environments (1, 2). To this end, single cell genomics can be used to increase the resolution of these studies by resolving limitations posed by traditional methods of investigation in their ability to directly link virus host pairs and through direct collection of cells that results in a more accurate representation of natural environments. Here we demonstrate a potential use of the pairing of single cell genomes with phenotypic measurements of respiration for those individual cells, to study the relationship between the presence of virally encoded AMGs and phenotypic characteristics of their host. We identified 2 virally encoded AMGS involved in cellular energy and respiration pathways that may play a role in altering the oxygen consumption of the host.

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