Extracellular ribosomal RNA provides a window into taxon-specific microbial lysis

Microbes are by far the dominant biomass in the world's oceans and drive biogeochemical cycles that are critical to life on Earth. The composition of marine microbial communities is highly dynamic spatially and temporally, with consequent effects on their functional roles. In part, these changes in composition result from viral lysis, which is taxon-specific and estimated to account for about half of marine microbial mortality. Here we determined taxon-specific cell lysis of prokaryotes in coastal seawater by sequencing extracellular and cellular ribosomal RNA (rRNA). We detected lysis in about 15% of the 16946 prokaryotic amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) identified, and lysis of up to 34% of the ASVs within a water sample. High lysis was most commonly associated with rare but typically highly productive bacteria, while relatively low lysis was more common in taxa that are often abundant, consistent with the proposed model of "kill the winner", and the idea that less abundant taxa generally experience higher relative lysis than dominant taxa. These results provide an explanation to the long-standing conundrum of why highly productive bacteria that are readily isolated from seawater are often in very low abundance.