Excited to share our new mSphere paper describing ssRNA viruses associated with Karenia brevis harmful algal blooms in southwest Florida in mSphere led by Jean Lim - a 🧵(1/10) 🧪🦠🌊 #MicroSky #ProtistsOnSky #USFCMS @asm.org @cmarinescience.bsky.social journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.... - ThreadSky

viromegirl.bsky.social • 42 days ago

Excited to share our new mSphere paper describing ssRNA viruses associated with Karenia brevis harmful algal blooms in southwest Florida in mSphere led by Jean Lim - a 🧵(1/10) 🧪🦠🌊 #MicroSky #ProtistsOnSky #USFCMS @asm.org @cmarinescience.bsky.social https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/msphere.01090-24

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viromegirl.bsky.social•42 days ago

The dinoflagellate Karenia brevis causes harmful algal blooms (HABs) that have negative effects on tourism, fisheries, public health, and the economy. Interactions with viruses can shape HAB life cycles and serve important roles in bloom ecology, including bloom termination (2/10)

viromegirl.bsky.social•42 days ago

But only a single study has previously described a "filterable lytic agent" that resulted in death of K. brevis cultures, but lysing cells mostly contained bacteria and agent was lost, leading to the thought that lysis may be due to phage-host interactions (3/10) - https://www.int-res.com/abstracts/ame/v27/n1/p21-27/

viromegirl.bsky.social•42 days ago

Here's where our work comes in! We used viral metagenomics to identify viruses in seawater samples collected during a severe, long-lasting, and spatiotemporally dynamic K. brevis bloom in southwest FL in 2021. We assembled several complete or near-complete viral genomes from these blooms (4/10)

viromegirl.bsky.social•42 days ago

We then designed reverse-transcriptase PCR primers for each representative viral genome to analyze their presence in the original samples and 43 other samples collected during a 2022-2023 HAB. Over half the samples contained multiple viruses, and at least one virus was found in 44/54 samples (5/10)

viromegirl.bsky.social•42 days ago

Analysis of these results showed that alpha diversity of these viruses was highest in the summer months and positively correlated with Karenia brevis cell counts (6/10)

viromegirl.bsky.social•42 days ago

Multiple regression revealed month and the presence of unclassified Riboviria sequences most similar to dinoflagellate viruses as significant predictors of the cellular abundance of K. brevis (7/10)

markowenmartin.bsky.social•42 days ago

Happy for you and your crew.

viromegirl.bsky.social•42 days ago

Thanks Mark! Excited to see what comes next on this topic. And I need to get back to posting on here so this was a great motivator.

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