Discarded diversity: novel megaphages, auxiliary metabolic genes, and virally encoded CRISPR-Cas systems in landfills.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Viruses are the most abundant microbial entities on the planet, impacting microbial community structure and ecosystem services. Despite outnumbering bacteria and archaea by an order of magnitude, viruses have been comparatively underrepresented in reference databases. Metagenomic examinations have illustrated that viruses of bacteria and archaea have been specifically understudied in engineered environments. Here we employed metagenomic and computational biology methods to examine the diversity, host interactions, and genetic systems of viruses predicted from 27 samples taken from three municipal landfills across North America.

Results

We identified numerous viruses that are not represented in reference databases, including the third largest bacteriophage genome i

SUBMITTER: George NA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12607003 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature