4.7 Article

Unravelling the ecological complexity of soil viromes: Challenges and opportunities

Journal

SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT
Volume 812, Issue -, Pages -

Publisher

ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.152217

Keywords

Viruses; Ecosystem function; Soil food web; Soil microbiome; Ecological complexity

Funding

  1. National Science Foundation of China [41907028, 41771289]
  2. Australian Research Council [DP210100332]

Ask authors/readers for more resources

Viruses are abundant and important in soil ecosystems, but the complexity of their ecology poses challenges due to technological limitations in characterizing their abundance, diversity, and interactions with other organisms. Current studies describe the diversity of soil viromes, but often do not explore their ecological roles.
Viruses are extremely abundant and ubiquitous in soil, and significantly contribute to various terrestrial ecosystem processes such as biogeochemical nutrient cycling, microbiome regulation and community assembly, and host evolutionary dynamics. Despite their numerous dominance and functional importance, understanding soil viral ecology is a formidable challenge, because of the technological challenges to characterize the abundance, diversity and community compositions of viruses, and their interactions with other organisms in the complex soil environment. Viruses may engage in a myriad of biological interactions within soil food webs across a broad range of spatiotemporal scales and are exposed to various biotic and abiotic disturbances. Current studies on the soil viromes, however, often describe the complexity of their tremendous diversity, but lack of exploring their potential ecological roles. In this article, we summarized the major methods to decipher the ecology of soil viruses, discussed biotic and abiotic factors and global change factors that shape the diversity and composition of soil viromes, and the ecological roles of soil viruses. We also proposed a new framework to understand the ecological complexity of viruses from micro to macro ecosystem scales and to predict and unravel their activities in terrestrial ecosystems.

Authors

I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.

Reviews

Primary Rating

4.7
Not enough ratings

Secondary Ratings

Novelty
-
Significance
-
Scientific rigor
-
Rate this paper

Recommended

No Data Available
No Data Available