Key role of selective viral‐induced mortality in determining marine bacterial community composition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Viral infection is thought to play an important role in shaping bacterial community composition and diversity in aquatic ecosystems, but the strength of this interaction and the mechanisms underlying this regulation are still not well understood. The consensus is that viruses may impact the dominant bacterial strains, but there is little information as to how viruses may affect the less abundant taxa, which often comprise the bulk of the total bacterial diversity. The potential effect of viruses on the phylogenetic composition of marine bacterioplankton was assessed by incubating marine bacteria collected along a North Pacific coastal-open ocean transect in seawater that was greatly depleted of ambient viruses. The ambient communities were dominated by typical marine groups, including alphaproteobacteria and the Bacteroidetes. Incubation of these communities in virus-depleted ambient water yielded an unexpected and dramatic increase in the relative abundance of bacterial groups that are generally undetectable in the in situ assemblages, such as betaproteobacteria and Actinobacteria. Our results suggest that host susceptibility is not necessarily only proportional to its density but to other characteristics of the host, that rare marine bacterial groups may be more susceptible to viral-induced mortality, and that these rare groups may actually be the winners of competition for resources. These observations are not inconsistent with the 'phage kills the winner' hypothesis but represent an extreme and yet undocumented case of this paradigm, where the potential winners apparently never actually develop beyond a very low abundance threshold in situ. We further suggest that this mode of regulation may influence not just the distribution of single strains but of entire phylogenetic groups.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".