Cyanolichen microbiome contains novel viruses that encode genes to promote microbial metabolism.

ABSTRACT: Lichen thalli are formed through the symbiotic association of a filamentous fungus and photosynthetic green alga and/or cyanobacterium. Recent studies have revealed lichens also host highly diverse communities of secondary fungal and bacterial symbionts, yet few studies have examined the viral component within these complex symbioses. Here, we describe viral biodiversity and functions in cyanolichens collected from across North America and Europe. As current machine-learning viral-detection tools are not trained on complex eukaryotic metagenomes, we first developed efficient methods to remove eukaryotic reads prior to viral detection and a custom pipeline to validate viral contigs predicted with three machine-learning methods. Our resulting high-quality viral data illustrate that every cya

SUBMITTER: Ponsero AJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9723557 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature