Adolescents, single-celled organisms floating in the ocean may be the first organisms to confirm eating the virus.
Scientists cut off the organism, known as Opponents, From the coast of Catalonia, Spain, to the Gulf of Maine and the surface waters of the Mediterranean Sea. They were found viral DNA Associated with two different groups of protostars, called choanozoans and picozones; Although some of these single-cell organisms were not closely related, similar DNA sequences arose in many members of both groups.
“It would be like a remotely related organism or even more remotely related to trees and humans,” said Julia Brown, a bioinformatist lead author at the Biglow Laboratory in Maine. “It simply came to our notice then Virus It is capable of infecting all the organisms we have discovered. “After conducting a number of tests, Brown and his colleagues concluded that the invaders ate the virus as food instead of being briefly objected to or infected by them. Their findings are published online today (Sept. 24) in the journal. Frontiers in Microbiology, Reshaping how we think about the whole ocean food web, the network of who eats – which connects everything from tiny bacteria to plants. Blue whale.
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However, one expert told Live Science that the study does not prove conclusively that the protesters actually ate the virus.
Christian Gribiller, a freshwater microbiology ecologist at the University of Vienna who was not involved in the study, said: “Investigating the viral sequence in a cell alone can hardly answer the question of how the virus particles got into the cell.” The ecologist, who was not involved in the study, said. An email. More work will be needed to show these opponents how and where the virus spreads, and if so, how much nutrition they get from this microscopic snack, he said.
New node in the food web?
Opponents are known as those who have the nucleus to keep their DNA Eukaryotes, Has been shown to take viral DNA in the past, Gribilare noted. However, scientists do not know much about how the virus takes over in the first place, he said. Opponents that suck free-floating viruses from the water around the filter feed, or they can pick up viruses riding on other small particles of matter in the ocean. In addition, a virus called bacteriophage infects Bacterial cells, And bacteria-eating protists can inadvertently carry the virus, he added.
But the big question is how much of a food source virus can be significant for protesters, who can eat them, Brown said.
The last few small studies on protist use of the virus took place in controlled laboratory settings, “but this [protist] Ramunas Stepnauskas, a senior research scientist at the Biglow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, said it does not represent what is abundant in the ocean, and no conclusions have been drawn about how relevant it is to what happens in the real world. Living science. To find real-world evidence that opponents ate the virus, Stefanouskus and his team went to the open sea.
In all, the team collected about 1,700 individual opponents from the Gulf of Maine and the Mediterranean Sea; They captured cells belonging to more than 10 different groups of Protestants, although Choanozoan and Picozoan appeared mainly in water samples from the Gulf of Maine. The team then sent water samples using a device called a flow cytometer, which adjusts any cells floating in the water based on their physical characteristics. From there, they analyzed the DNA associated with each sorted cell; This includes the DNA of the cell itself, any microorganisms stuck on its surface, and any organism trapped inside the organism.
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The technique of storing these genes “does not differentiate between genomic DNA and any other DNA already present in the cell, which is why we were able to see viral DNA and any bacteria involved there,” Brown said. Overall, viral DNA appeared in about 51% of the Gulf of Maine and 35% of Mediterranean protests, most of them with viruses infected with bacteriophages or bacteria. But in the groups of chonozoans and picozones, 100% of the samples have viral DNA sequences, but little trace of bacterial DNA, in comparison. This indicates that the prophets took the infected bacteria in solitude, rather than eating them.
“We’ve seen elevated levels of the virus in these two groups, and consistently in all members of the groups,” Brown said. All of these adversaries also ruled out the possibility of being directly infected by the virus .Then the team thought that the virus could either hang out of cells or accidentally infect cells while the flow was in the cytometer. But they found that “the level of the virus in the cells we see is above the number that will be sorted by accident.” Different levels of the virus between different protest groups also make it unlikely that the pathogens aggressively block the protests, he added.
Still some strangers
Despite this data, Gribiller said there have been alternative revelations about how it still goes viral. DNA Protists consume infected bacterial cells, including the possibility of termination in protists. To rule out this possibility, study authors must examine whether the viral sequences found in protists are also abundant in bacterial cells, and how often those bacterial cells appear in the cellular bellows of protists, he said. In addition, if the virus represents a food source, the amount of nutrient virus must still be calculated, Gribiller added.
“Back-of-the-envelope calculations show that a protozoan cell that eats virus particles instead of bacterial cells needs to take 100 (or more) virus particles to get the same amount. Carbon “When eating bacterial cells,” he noted. It is very possible that “eukaryotic proteists -” can trace their carbon and nutrient demand from the virus’s diet. “
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That said, while chonozoan is known for the consumption of bacteria, the diet of picozoans remains somewhat mysterious. A report was published in the journal in 2007 Plaza one, Found that Picozoa feeding atherosclerosis is too small to capture bacterial cells, but large enough to contain particles less than 0.000006 inches (150 nanometers) in diameter, which may contain viruses. “Picozoa is a really mysterious group of opponents at sea,” noted Stefnauskas. They can make up as much as 15% of a given Protestant community, especially those living in coastal waters, so learning whether or not pixoins eat the virus can shape our understanding of how nutrients flow into the ocean, he said.
“If you combine biomass of marine protists or marine viruses, that biomass compound is greater than all whales,” Stepnauskas said. To send nutrients through the food web, “the big organism we see with the naked eye … it’s based entirely on microscopic organisms”.
The virus not only infects cells but can also be seen as an important node in the food web, he added, adding that “there is a different way of thinking.” By replacing nutrients at higher levels of the web, ripples can send impact through the entire marine ecosystem, Brown said.
Published on Original Living Science.
