Viruses of the Archaea

Tamara Basta, Institute Pasteur, Paris, France
Roger A Garrett, Copenhagen University, Copenhagen, Denmark
David Prangishvili, Institute Pasteur, Paris, France

Published online: July 2008

DOI: 10.1002/9780470015902.a0000774.pub2

Double-stranded deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) viruses that infect members of the third domain of life, the Archaea, are diverse and exceptional in both their morphotypes and their genomic properties. The majority of characterized species infect hyperthermophilic hosts and carry morphological features which have not been observed for viruses from the other domains of life, the Bacteria and the Eukarya. This exceptional status of the archaeal viruses is reinforced by the finding that a large majority of their predicted genes yield no sequence matches in public sequence databases, and their functions remain unknown. One of the viruses, the bicaudavirus ATV (Acidianus two-tailed virus), is quite unique in that it undergoes a major morphological change, growing long tail structures, extracellularly. A small minority of archaeal viruses, which exclusively infect mesophilic or moderately thermophilic hosts, are morphologically similar to head-tail DNA viruses of bacteria.

Keywords: Archaea; dsDNA virus

Figure 1. Electron micrographs of viruses of the Archaea. (a) Sulfolobus islandicus rod-shaped virus 1, SIRV1; (b) Acidianus filamentous virus 1, AFV1; in insets claw-like structures are shown in ‘open’ and ‘closed’ conformation, white arrow indicates a ‘claw’ clamped around host pili and separated from the virion body, and black arrow indicates pili-like appendices of the host cell. (c) Sulfolobus shibatae virus 1, SSV1; (d) Acidianus two-tailed virus, ATV; (e) Sulfolobus neozealandicus droplet-shaped virus, SNDV; (f) Acidianus bottle-shaped virus, ABV; (g) Pyrobaculum spherical virus, PSV; (h) Sulfolobus turreted icosahedral virus, STIV and (i) Haloarchaeal virus ÖH. Scale bars represent 200 nm except in g, h, i and insets where it represents 100 nm. Figures 1a, 1c, 1e and 1i are courtesy of the late Wolfram Zillig. Figure 1b was published in Virology, 315, Bettsetter et al. 68–79, copyright Elsevier (2003). Reproduced with permission. Figure 1f was reproduced with permission from the American Society for Microbiology from Haring et al., 2005, Journal of Virology, 79: 9904–9911. Figure 1g was publsihed in Virology, 323, Haring et al. 233–242, copyright Elsevier (2004). Reproduced with permission. Figure 1h is courtesy of Mark Young.
Figure 2. Proportions of different sets of genes in genomes of archaeal viruses. Viral+Cell, genes with homologues in other viruses and cellular life forms; viral only, genes with homologues detectable only in other viruses; cellular, genes with homologues detectable only in cellular life forms; unique, genes without detectable homologues. This figure was prepared by Eugene Koonin and published in Virus Research, 117, Prangishvili et al. 52–67, copyright Elsevier (2006). Reproduced with permission.
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 Further Reading
    Dyall-Smith M, Tang SL and Bath C (2003) Haloarchaeal viruses: how diverse are they? Research in Microbiology 154: 309–313.
    Geslin C, Le Romancer M, Erauso G et al. (2003) PAV1, the first virus-like particle isolated from a hyperthermophilic euryarchaeote, “Pyrococcus abyssi”. Journal of Bacteriology 185: 3888–3894.
    Pfister P, Wasserfallen A, Stettler R and Leisinger T (1998) Molecular analysis of Methanobacterium phage psiM2. Molecular Microbiology 30: 233–244.
    Porter K, Kukkaro P, Bamford JK et al. (2005) SH1: a novel, spherical halovirus isolated from an Australian hypersaline lake. Virology 335: 22–33.
    Prangishvili D, Forterre P and Garrett RA (2006) Viruses of the Archaea: a unifying view. Nature Reviews. Microbiology 4: 837–848.
    Prangishvili D and Garrett RA (2005) Viruses of hyperthermophilic Crenarchaea. Trends in Microbiology 13: 535–542.
    book Stedman KM, Prangishvili D and Zillig W (2006) "Viruses of Archaea". In: Calendar R (ed.), The Bacteriophages, pp. 499–517. New York: Oxford University Press.
    Tang SL, Nuttall S and Dyall-Smith M (2004) Haloviruses HF1 and HF2: evidence for a recent and large recombination event. Journal of Bacteriology 186: 2810–2817.

Related Sub-Topics:

Viruses Infecting Archaea | Archaea | Genomes and Chromosomes
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Article Title: Viruses of the Archaea
 
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Basta, Tamara, Garrett, Roger A, and Prangishvili, David(Jul 2008) Viruses of the Archaea. In: eLS. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester. http://www.els.net [doi: 10.1002/9780470015902.a0000774.pub2]