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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Abstract:
Marine viruses have important roles in microbial mortality, gene transfer, metabolic reprogramming and biogeochemical cycling. However, methodological limitations have previously prevented a quantitative assessment of their community structure and ecosystem impacts. Recent transformative advances have led to construction of a sample-to-sequence pipeline that enables a quantitative assessment of marine viral communities using metagenomic techniques, and has facilitated a rapid increase in knowledge of marine viral ecology and their impacts on oceanic ecosystem function. Here I focus on recent studies that have greatly advanced our knowledge of marine viruses, including (i) a global-scale assessment of marine viral community structure and the factors that drive this variability, (ii) a study that connects this global-scale viral metagenomic data to the roles of viruses in the oceanic carbon cycle, and (iii) further methodological advances, including bioinformatic approaches and metaproteomics, that are enabling us to illuminate both taxonomic and functional viral ‘dark matter’ that dominates environmental viral metagenomes.
