Surprisingly active and dynamic viral communities in soil

Viruses have been recognized as abundant but virtually unknown members of the soil microbiome. Early insights into soil viral diversity and distribution patterns over local and global scales will be presented. Using shotgun viral metagenomic (viromic) approaches to recover and sequence the viral size fraction, hundreds of thousands of viral ‘species’ have been recovered from a wide range of soils, consistently indicating high viral diversity across terrestrial ecosystems. Soil viral communities are often strongly spatially structured, even over short distances, and they exhibit reproducible temporal successional patterns following rewetting of dry soil. The emerging paradigm is of a highly active and dynamic soil virosphere with the potential for substantial contributions to bacterial mortality, biogeochemical cycling, and food web dynamics in terrestrial ecosystems.