Archaeal viruses, or archaeoviruses, display a wide range of virion morphotypes. Whereas the majority of those morphotypes are unique to archaeal viruses, some are more widely distributed across different cellular domains. Tailed double-stranded DNA archaeoviruses are remarkably similar to viruses of the same morphology (order Caudovirales) that infect many bacterial hosts. They have, so far, only been found in one phylum of the archaea, the Euryarchaeota, which has led to controversial hypotheses about their origin. In the present paper, we describe the identification and analysis of a putative provirus present in the genome of a mesophilic thaumarchaeon. We show that the provirus is related to tailed bacterial and euryarchaeal viruses and encodes a full complement of proteins that are required to build a tailed virion. The recently discovered wide distribution of tailed viruses in Euryarchaeota and the identification of a related provirus in Thaumarchaeota, an archaeal phylum which might have branched off before the separation of Crenarchaeota and Euryarchaeota, suggest that an association of these viruses with Archaea might be more ancient than previously anticipated.
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February 2011
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Conference Article|
January 19 2011
A thaumarchaeal provirus testifies for an ancient association of tailed viruses with archaea
Mart Krupovic;
Mart Krupovic
1
*Institut Pasteur, Unité Biologie Moléculaire du Gène chez les Extrêmophiles, 28 rue du Dr Roux, 75015 Paris, France
1To whom correspondence should be addressed (email krupovic@pasteur.fr).
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Anja Spang;
Anja Spang
†University of Vienna, Department of Genetics in Ecology, Althanstrasse 14, A-1090 Vienna, Austria
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Simonetta Gribaldo;
Simonetta Gribaldo
*Institut Pasteur, Unité Biologie Moléculaire du Gène chez les Extrêmophiles, 28 rue du Dr Roux, 75015 Paris, France
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Patrick Forterre;
Patrick Forterre
*Institut Pasteur, Unité Biologie Moléculaire du Gène chez les Extrêmophiles, 28 rue du Dr Roux, 75015 Paris, France
‡Institut de Génétique et Microbiologie, Université Paris-Sud 11, UMR8621-CNRS, IFR115, Orsay, France
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Christa Schleper
Christa Schleper
†University of Vienna, Department of Genetics in Ecology, Althanstrasse 14, A-1090 Vienna, Austria
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Publisher: Portland Press Ltd
Received:
November 05 2010
Online ISSN: 1470-8752
Print ISSN: 0300-5127
© The Authors Journal compilation © 2011 Biochemical Society
2011
Biochem Soc Trans (2011) 39 (1): 82–88.
Article history
Received:
November 05 2010
Citation
Mart Krupovic, Anja Spang, Simonetta Gribaldo, Patrick Forterre, Christa Schleper; A thaumarchaeal provirus testifies for an ancient association of tailed viruses with archaea. Biochem Soc Trans 1 February 2011; 39 (1): 82–88. doi: https://doi.org/10.1042/BST0390082
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