191 / 2025-04-14 15:34:11

Warming stimulates viral turnover in the ocean

viral production,viraldecay

Theme 2: Geobiology of Modern Habitable Earth > Session 2b: The Geological Roles and Records of Viruses

Investigating responses of marine viruses to the variation of climate change factors are essential to understanding the effect of global climate change on viral dynamics in the marine microbial food web and virus-mediated biogeochemical cycle. However, there are few studies on the effect of global warming on in situ virus population in the tropical ocean. Therefore, we performed an experiment to explore the effect of warming on the dynamics of in situ virus population in South China Sea. Interestingly, as a tropical marine virus population, our results suggest that warming could directly promote the viral decay, and probably through increase in burst size and decrease in latent period indirectly enhance the viral production. As two subpopulations of marine viruses, low-fluorescence viruses may be more sensitive to warming than high-fluorescence viruses. Furthermore, our model predicts that in situ bacterial abundance will reduce ca. 9% per 1°C increase in future warming ocean. This results in ca. 0.14 Gt carbon from bacterial particulate organic matter to lysate dissolved organic matter, probably turbulenting the stability of virus-mediated carbon flow and sequestration in future ocean. In general, this study indicates for the first time that warming will accelerate the turnover of virus population in a typical tropical ocean, and provides a novel perspective of the significant effect of warming on virus-mediated biogeochemical cycles.