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A non-tailed twist in the viral tale

Microscopy studies indicate that the most common viruses in the sea lack a tail structure. However, most cultured marine viruses have tails. A family of these elusive non-tailed marine viruses has now been identified.
  1. Julio Cesar Ignacio-Espinoza

    1. Julio Cesar Ignacio-Espinoza is in the Department of Biological Sciences and at the Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA.

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  2. Jed A. Fuhrman

    1. Jed A. Fuhrman is in the Department of Biological Sciences and at the Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA.

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Bacteriophages, the viruses that infect bacteria, are thought to be the most abundant biological entities on Earth1. It has been estimated that, if lined up end to end, bacteriophages from the oceans alone would cover a distance of 3 million parsecs, past many distant galaxies2. Most bacteriophages cultured in the laboratory or represented in DNA-sequence databases have a ‘tail’ structure, which might take the form of a tube with spider-leg-like protrusions (similar in shape to the base of the Apollo Moon lander). However, electron-microscopy analysis of ocean samples indicates that oceanic viruses are predominantly non-tailed3,4,5. Therefore, identifying the ‘missing’ non-tailed marine viruses might improve our understanding of how viruses regulate the microbial systems that control a large fraction of global carbon and nitrogen cycling2,6. In a paper in Nature, Kauffman et al.7 report the discovery of a non-tailed viral family that they suggest might be an important component of the missing viruses, and they explain why this group might have eluded detection until now.

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Nature 554, 38-39 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-00923-8

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