Structure and replication cycle of a virus infecting climate-modulating alga Emiliania huxleyi
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The globally distributed marine alga Emiliania huxleyi produces reflective calcite disks (coccoliths) that increase the albedo of ocean water and thus reduce the heat absorption in the ocean, which cools the Earth’s climate. The population density of E. huxleyi is restricted by Nucleocytoviricota viruses, including E. huxleyi virus 201 (EhV-201). Despite the impact of E. huxleyi viruses on the climate, there is limited information about their structure and replication. Here we show that the dsDNA genome inside the EhV-201 virion is protected by an inner membrane, capsid, and outer membrane decorated with numerous transmembrane proteins. The virions are prone to deformation, and parts of their capsids deviate from the icosahedral arrangement. EhV-201 virions infect E. huxleyi by using their fivefold vertex to bind to a host cell and fuse the virus’s inner membrane with the plasma membrane. Whereas the replication of EhV-201 probably occurs in the nucleus, virions assemble in the cytoplasm at the surface of endoplasmic reticulum-derived membrane segments. Genome packaging initiates synchronously with the capsid assembly and completes through an aperture in the forming capsid. Upon the completion of genome packaging, the capsids change conformation, which enables them to acquire an outer membrane by budding into intracellular vesicles. EhV-201 infection induces a loss of surface protective layers from E. huxleyi cells, which allows the continuous release of virions by exocytosis. Our results provide insight into how EhVs bypass the surface protective layers of E. huxleyi and exploit the organelles of an infected cell for progeny assembly.
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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) | 0.002 | 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 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".