Metagenomes of a Freshwater Charavirus from British Columbia Provide a Window into Ancient Lineages of Viruses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Charophyte algae, not chlorophyte algae, are the ancestors of ‘higher plants’; hence, viruses infecting charophytes may be related to those that first infected higher plants. Streamwaters from British Columbia, Canada, yielded single-stranded RNA metagenomes of Charavirus canadensis (CV-Can), that are similar in genomic architecture, length (9593 nt), nucleotide identity (63.4%), and encoded amino-acid sequence identity (53.0%) to those of Charavirus australis (CV-Aus). The sequences of their RNA-dependent RNA-polymerases (RdRp) resemble those found in benyviruses, their helicases those of hepaciviruses and hepegiviruses, and their coat-proteins (CP) those of tobamoviruses; all from the alphavirus/flavivirus branch of the ‘global RNA virome’. The 5’-terminus of the CV-Can genome, but not that of CV-Aus, is complete and encodes a methyltransferase domain. Comparisons of CP sequences suggests that Canadian and Australian charaviruses diverged 29–46 million years ago (mya); whereas, the CPs of charaviruses and tobamoviruses last shared a common ancestor 212 mya, and the RdRps of charaviruses and benyviruses 396 mya. CV-Can is sporadically abundant in low-nutrient freshwater rivers in British Columbia, where Chara braunii, a close relative of C. australis, occurs, and which may be its natural host. Charaviruses, like their hosts, are ancient and widely distributed, and thus provide a window to the viromes of early eukaryotes and, even, Archaea.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.022 | 0.001 |
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 teacher head, 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".