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closeJournal Club (from Dick Castenholz) on the (lack of) archaeal sequences
Posted by jlgreen on 20 Feb 2008 at 06:43 GMT
Do the authors have any insight into why there was no detection of archaeal viral sequences? Archaeal hosts should have occurred everywhere in the open sea. Given the length of the transect I would have expected to see some.
RE: Journal Club (from Dick Castenholz) on the (lack of) archaeal sequences
shanca replied to jlgreen on 26 Feb 2008 at 17:53 GMT
I agree that archaeal viruses are likely to be important components of marine virioplankton. Along these lines, Winter and co-workers (Microbial Ecology '08) recently observed a negative relationship between archaeal richness and the frequency of infected cells in the Eastern Tropical Atlantic. However, the lack of marine archaeal viral sequence information within public databases made it difficult for us to identify potential archaeal viruses in GOS samples based on sequence homology. We did observed some similarity to viruses infective for Sulfolobus (hot-spring bug), but this was not significant.