Organic Lake
Organic Lake is a lake in the Vestfold Hills in eastern Antarctica. It was formed 6,000 years ago when sea levels were higher; it is isolated, rather shallow (7.5m), meromictic, a few hundred meters in diameter and has extremely salty water. It has the highest recorded concentration of dimethyl sulfide in any natural body of water.[1][2]
In 2011, a new species of virophage (a satellite virus that impairs the ability of its co-infective host virus to replicate) was discovered in Organic Lake, the Organic Lake virophage. It is a parasite of 'Organic Lake phycodnavirus',[1] a large virus that infects algae and belongs to the nucleocytoplasmic large DNA viruses (NCLDV), but in fact may rather be a member of an extended family Mimiviridae (aka Megaviridae) than of the family Phycodnaviridae.[3][4][5][6][7]
References
- ^ a b "'Virus-eater' discovered in Antarctic lake". Nature News. 28 March 2011.
- ^ Franzmann, PD; PP Deprez; HR Burton; J van den Hoff (1987-01-01). "Limnology of Organic Lake, Antarctica, a meromictic lake that contains high concentrations of dimethyl sulfide". Mar. Freshwater Res. 38 (3): 409–417.
- ^ Eugene V Koonin, Mart Krupovic, Natalya Yutin: Evolution of double-stranded DNA viruses of eukaryotes: From bacteriophages to transposons to giant viruses, in: ResearchGate Literature Review February 2015, doi: 10.1111/nyas.12728, Figure 3
- ^ Blog of Carolina Reyes, Kenneth Stedman: Are Phaeocystis globosa viruses (OLPG) and Organic Lake phycodnavirus a part of the Phycodnaviridae or Mimiviridae?, on ResearchGate, Jan. 8, 2016
- ^ Fumito Maruyama and Shoko Ueki: Evolution and Phylogeny of Large DNA Viruses, Mimiviridae and Phycodnaviridae Including Newly Characterized Heterosigma akashiwo Virus, in: Front. Microbiol., 30 November 2016, doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2016.01942
- ^ Weijia Zhang et al.: Four novel algal virus genomes discovered from Yellowstone Lake metagenomes, in: Scientific Reports 5, Article number: 15131 (2015), doi: 10.1038/srep15131
- ^ F. Schulz et al.: [1], in: Science 356, 82-85, July 4th 2017, UCPMS ID: 1889607, doi: 10.1126/science.aal4657, PDF, especially Fig. 2