Program

Abstract: Viruses are the most abundant biological entities in the ocean. Many studies had showed that viruses play an important role in marine microbial food webs and biogeochemical cycling.There are only limited modeling studies of environmental effect on the relationship between marine virus and bacteria. Here, we use a model to show warming in the ocean can increase viral abundance and viral infection rate on the host bacteria. Samples were collected during winter of 2012 in the west Pacific and fall of 2013 in north South China Sea (SCS) and SCS Basin. The on-board culture experiments with controlled temperature using these samples showed that the rates of both viral production (VP) and viral decay (VD) increased with temperature, with the change of VP more than that of VD. Based on these data, we established a virus-bacteria model, allowing temperature-dependent relationship between viruses and bacteria. Our results indicate that the turnover rate of marine viral pool and so that the marine biogeochemical cycles may accelerate with global warming in the future.

Key word: western Pacific, South China Sea, marine virus, bacteria, modeling