Like dry land, marine waters are populated by bacteria. Some of them carry viruses, but many of them might promote carbon storage at the bottom of the oceans.
tonaquatic / Getty Images
This amazing discovery was made by American scientists from the Ohio State University and relayed in the journal Science. The researchers carried out an in-depth analysis of no less than 5,500 species carrying marine RNA viruses.
By closely observing their genes and their functions in the ocean ecosystem, the authors of the work found that these particles might contribute to the absorption of carbon from the atmosphere and its permanent storage at the bottom of the ocean.
“Escape the worst effects of climate change”
According to the researchers, these viruses might “move towards a more digestible carbon, which would allow them to produce increasingly larger cells and to sink. We will thus gain a few hundred or thousands of additional years to escape the worst effects of climate change”, estimates the scientist Matthew Sullivan, who led the study.
The authors of the work developed computational techniques in order to obtain information on the functions and hosts of RNA viruses from genome fragments.
Further analysis identified 1,243 RNA virus species linked to carbon export. Eleven of them have been implicated in promoting the export of carbon to the sea floor. Of these, two viruses linked to hosts of the algal family have been identified.
“The results are important for building models and predicting what is happening with carbon in the right direction and at the right magnitude,” said Ahmed Zayed, a microbiology researcher at India State University. Ohio and co-lead author of the study.
“Viruses don’t care regarding temperature”
The study also notes a significant presence of marine RNA viruses in the Atlantic and Antarctic oceans. A phenomenon that the team of researchers had not anticipated, given the fact that biodiversity is generally denser and more varied in tropical regions than in polar areas. “When it comes to diversity, viruses don’t care regarding temperature,” says Professor Zayed.
These RNA viruses were detected in plankton samples collected by the “Tara Oceans Consortium“, an ongoing global study aimed at measuring the impact of climate change on the ocean.
Relax
