Abstract:

The deep biosphere is the dark ecosystem buried deep in the earth. Different from the surface biosphere that uses solar energy to maintain photosynthesis, deep microorganisms can convert inorganic matter into organic matter through chemical energy synthesis forming a "dark food chain." However, constrained by the extremely scarce nutrients, virus lysis may be a key driving force for material circulation in the deep biosphere. Due to the difficulty of obtaining samples from the deep biosphere and the low biomass, there are still few studies on deep biosphere viruses, and the content is still abundance statistics. Another way, by mining the public databases, we have discovered a large number of unique viruses. Through the analysis of these viral genomes, it is found that a large number of viruses carry auxiliary metabolic genes that promote the assimilation of sulfate reduction of their hosts. Moreover, the results of host prediction and homologous gene network analysis show that methane anaerobic oxidation archaeal bacteriophages and sulfate-reducing bacteriophages have high similarities, suggesting a close relationship between them. In addition, we have also made great efforts to explored the viruses in our deep biosphere samples, and optimized methods from many aspects such as microbial microscopic observation, DNA extraction and contamination control, which laid the foundation for subsequent research.

个人简介：

王龙，近海海洋环境科学国家重点实验室“杰出博士后”，合作导师为张锐教授。博士毕业于中国海洋大学微生物学专业，期间获得中国海洋大学校长奖学金，优秀博士毕业论文等。目前主要研究方向为深部生物圈等极端环境下病毒的基因组成和生态作用。迄今共发表SCI论文13篇，其中第一作者或共同第一作者5篇。主持国家自然科学基金青年基金1项，中国博士后基金面上资助1项。