Poster abstracts
Poster number 9 submitted by Alfonso Carrillo
Sub-daily virus sampling at the Bermuda Atlantic Time Series reveals diel and depth-structured population dynamics without community-level shifts
Alfonso Carrillo (Department of Microbiology, Ohio State University), Emily Hageman, Kimberley S. Ndlovu, Funing Tian, Dean Vik (Department of Microbiology, Ohio State University), Christine Sun, Ricardo R. Pavan, Matthew B. Sullivan (Department of Microbiology, Ohio State University), Joshua S. Weitz, Daniel Muratore (Georgia Institute of Technology), Naomi E. Gilbert, Gary R. LeCleir, Steven W. Wilhelm (Department of Microbiology, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville)
Abstract:
Ocean microbes contribute to biogeochemical cycles and ecosystem function, but they do so under top-down pressure imposed by viruses. While viruses are increasingly understood spatially and beginning to be incorporated into predictive modeling, high-frequency ocean virus dynamics remain understudied due to methodological challenges. Here we sampled stratified Bermuda Atlantic Time Series (BATS) waters for 112 hours at sub-daily 4- (surface) or 12- (deep chlorophyll maximum) hour intervals, purified viral particles from these samples, sequenced their metagenomes, and used the resulting data to characterize high-frequency virus community dynamics. Aggregated community diversity metrics changed with depth, but were not statistically significant temporally at a fixed location. However, finer-scale population-level analyses revealed both depth and temporal change, including physicochemical depth-driven differences and, in surface waters, thousands of viral populations that exhibited statistically significant diel rhythms. Statistical analyses revealed three main archetypes of temporal dynamics that themselves differed in abundance patterns, host predictions, viral taxonomy, and gene functions. Among these, highlights include viruses resembling an archetype with a night peaking pattern in activity that include an over-representation of viruses that putatively infect Prochlorococcus, a phototrophic cyanobacteria. Together, these efforts provide baseline community- and population-scale short-time-frame observations relevant to future climate state modeling.
References:
Ni, T., & Zeng, Q. (2016). Diel Infection of Cyanobacteria by Cyanophages. Frontiers in Marine Science, 2. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2015.00123
Roux, S., Brum, J. R., Dutilh, B. E., Sunagawa, S., Duhaime, M. B., Loy, A., ... & Sullivan, M. B. (2016). Ecogenomics and potential biogeochemical impacts of globally abundant ocean viruses. Nature, 537(7622), 689-693.
Keywords: Time-series, Viral ecology, Marine science