PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Kaneko, Hiroto
AU  - Blanc-Mathieu, Romain
AU  - Endo, Hisashi
AU  - Chaffron, Samuel
AU  - Delmont, Tom O.
AU  - Gaia, Morgan
AU  - Henry, Nicolas
AU  - Hernández-Velázquez, Rodrigo
AU  - Nguyen, Canh Hao
AU  - Mamitsuka, Hiroshi
AU  - Forterre, Patrick
AU  - Jaillon, Olivier
AU  - de Vargas, Colomban
AU  - Sullivan, Matthew B.
AU  - Suttle, Curtis A.
AU  - Guidi, Lionel
AU  - Ogata, Hiroyuki
TI  - Eukaryotic virus composition can predict the efficiency of carbon export in the global ocean
AID  - 10.1101/710228
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 710228
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/10/07/710228.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/10/07/710228.full
AB  - The biological carbon pump, in which carbon fixed by photosynthesis is exported to the deep ocean through sinking, is a major process in Earth’s carbon cycle. The proportion of primary production that is exported is termed the carbon export efficiency (CEE). Based on in-lab or regional scale observations, viruses were previously suggested to affect the CEE (i.e., viral “shunt” and “shuttle”). In this study, we tested associations between viral community composition and CEE measured at a global scale. A regression model based on relative abundance of viral marker genes explained 67% of the variation in CEE. Viruses with high importance in the model were predicted to infect ecologically important hosts. These results are consistent with the view that the viral shunt and shuttle functions at a large scale and further imply that viruses likely act in this process in a way dependent on their hosts and ecosystem dynamics.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.