Abstract:
The metaviromes from 2 different
Antarctic terrestrial soil niches have
been analyzed. Both hypoliths (microbial
assemblages beneath transluscent rocks)
and surrounding open soils showed a
high level diversity of tailed phages,
viruses of algae and amoeba, and virophage
sequences. Comparisons of other
global metaviromes with the Antarctic
libraries showed a niche-dependent clustering
pattern, unrelated to the geographical
origin of a given metavirome. Within
the Antarctic open soil metavirome, a
putative circularly permuted, »42kb
dsDNA virus genome was annotated,
showing features of a temperate phage
possessing a variety of conserved protein
domains with no significant taxonomic
affiliations in current databases.
