Role of phylogenetic structure in the dynamics of coastal viral assemblages
Marine microbes, including viruses, are an essential part of the marine ecosystem, forming the base of the foodweb and driving biogeochemical cycles. Within this system, the composition of viral assemblages changes markedly with time, with some of these changes being repeatable through time; however, the extent to which these dynamics are reflected within versus among evolutionarily-related groups of viruses is largely unexplored. To examine these dynamics, changes in the composition of two groups of ecologically important viruses and communities of their potential hosts were sampled every two weeks for 13 months at a coastal site in British Columbia, Canada. We sequenced two marker genes for viruses, the major capsid protein (gp23) of T4-like phages and their relatives, and the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) of marnavirus-like RNA viruses, as well as their bacterial and eukaryotic host communities, the genes encoding 16S and 18S ribosomal RNA (rRNA). There were strong lagged correlations between viral diversity and community similarity of putative hosts implying that the viruses influenced the composition of the host communities. The results showed that for both viral assemblages, the dominant clusters of phylogenetically-related viruses shifted over time and this was correlated with environmental changes. Viral clusters contained many ephemeral taxa and few persistent taxa, but within a viral assemblage the ephemeral and persistent taxa were closely related implying ecological dynamics within these clusters. Furthermore, these dynamics occurred in both the RNA and DNA viral assemblages surveyed, implying that this structure is common in natural viral assemblages. Importance Viruses are major agents of microbial mortality in marine systems; yet, little is known about changes in the composition of viral assemblages in relation to that of the microbial communities that they infect. Here, we sampled coastal seawater every two weeks for one year and used high-throughput sequencing of marker genes to follow changes in the composition of two groups of ecologically important viruses, as well as the communities of bacteria and protists that serve as their respective hosts. Different subsets of genetically related viruses dominated at different times. These results demonstrate that although the genetic composition of viral genotypes is highly dynamic temporally, for the most part the shuffling of genotypes occurs within a few clusters of phylogenetically related viruses. Thus, it appears that even in temperate coastal waters with large seasonal changes the highly dynamic shuffling of viral genotypes largely occurs within a few subsets of related individuals.