Illuminating structural proteins in viral "dark matter" with metaproteomics.

ABSTRACT: Viruses are ecologically important, yet environmental virology is limited by dominance of unannotated genomic sequences representing taxonomic and functional "viral dark matter." Although recent analytical advances are rapidly improving taxonomic annotations, identifying functional dark matter remains problematic. Here, we apply paired metaproteomics and dsDNA-targeted metagenomics to identify 1,875 virion-associated proteins from the ocean. Over one-half of these proteins were newly functionally annotated and represent abundant and widespread viral metagenome-derived protein clusters (PCs). One primarily unannotated PC dominated the dataset, but structural modeling and genomic context identified this PC as a previously unidentified capsid protein from multiple uncultivated tailed virus fa

SUBMITTER: Brum JR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4780635 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature