Abstract
Viral communities of two different salt pans located in the Namib Desert, Hosabes and Eisfeld, were investigated using a combination of multiple displacement amplification of metaviromic DNA and deep sequencing, and provided comprehensive sequence data on both ssDNA and dsDNA viral community structures. Read and contig annotations through online pipelines showed that the salt pans harbored largely unknown viral communities. Through network analysis, we were able to assign a large portion of the unknown reads to a diverse group of ssDNA viruses. Contigs belonging to the subfamily Gokushovirinae were common in both environmental datasets. Analysis of haloarchaeal virus contigs revealed the presence of three contigs distantly related with His1, indicating a possible new lineage of salterproviruses in the Hosabes playa. Based on viral richness and read mapping analyses, the salt pan metaviromes were novel and most closely related to each other while showing a low degree of overlap with other environmental viromes.
Highlights
Research into the viral community structure of saline environments has focused mainly on marine environments with a limited number of studies looking at moderate or hypersaline lakes and solar salterns [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
Isolation studies of hypersaline environments have revealed four main types of virus morphologies; spindle shaped or fusiform, head-tail, icosahedral and pleomorphic, while filamentous and rod-shaped viruses have been observed by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) [2,17,18,19]
To investigate potential new lineages of haloarchaeal viruses, we examined contigs with a length approximating that of the genome to which they showed the most similarity
Summary
Research into the viral community structure of saline environments has focused mainly on marine environments with a limited number of studies looking at moderate or hypersaline lakes and solar salterns [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Isolation studies of hypersaline environments have revealed four main types of virus morphologies; spindle shaped or fusiform, head-tail, icosahedral and pleomorphic, while filamentous and rod-shaped viruses have been observed by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) [2,17,18,19]. Not all of these morphologies are necessarily seen in any hypersaline environment, as shown by the viral diversity of Mono Lake (CA, USA) where only tailed and icosahedral viruses were found [20].
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