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Annual Review of Marine Science

Volume 17, 2025

How Viruses Shape Microbial Plankton Microdiversity

  • Francisco Rodriguez-Valera1 and Christopher Bellas2
  • 1Evolutionary Genomics Group, Departamento de Producción Vegetal y Microbiología, Universidad Miguel Hernández, San Juan de Alicante, Spain; email: [email protected] 2Department of Ecology, Universität Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria; email: [email protected]
  • Vol. 17:561-576 (Volume publication date January 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on July 01, 2024
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

One major conundrum of modern microbiology is the large pangenome (gene pool) present in microbes, which is much larger than those found in complex organisms such as humans. Here, we argue that this diversity of gene pools carried by different strains is maintained largely due to the control exercised by viral predation. Viruses maintain a high strain diversity through time that we describe as constant-diversity equilibrium, preventing the hoarding of resources by specific clones. Thus, viruses facilitate the release and degradation of dissolved organic matter in the ocean, which may lead to better ecosystem functioning by linking top-down to bottom-up control. By maintaining this equilibrium, viruses act as a key element of the adaptation of marine microbes to their environment and likely behave as a single evolutionary unit.

Keyword(s): constant-diversity equilibrium, kill-the-winner, pangenome, phages, population genomics
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2025-01-16
2025-06-20
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How Viruses Shape Microbial Plankton Microdiversity
Annual Review of Marine Science 17, 561 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-marine-040623-090847
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-marine-040623-090847
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-marine-040623-090847
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