Tracking the Viruses of Yellowstone's Acidic Hot Springs

A hydrothermal pool in Yellowstone National Park (Image: Flickr/Don Graham). Viruses are the most common biological entities on Earth, numbering in the cool billion billion trillions. And while their dependency on full-blown cells relegates them to the realm of pseudo-life, viruses have enormous impacts on other biological communities and the flow of elements and nutrients through global systems. This realization has spurred research into environmental viruses, the type that infect not human or animal hosts, but microbial ones. The nature of these interactions – the consistency over time, the number of viral species and their interconnectedness – is an emerging area of research. This is particularly true of Archaea-targeting viruses: the host microbes themselves have only recently been accepted as important ecosystem players, and the role of viral forcing is just coming into focus. To pursue these questions, a group of researchers led by Benjamin Bolduc at Montana State University ...