Limited consensus of marine viral diversity observed across techniques
Marina Vila-Nistal, Francisco Martinez-Hernandez, Monica Lluesma-Gomez, Oscar Fornas, Simon Roux, Manuel Martinez-Garcia · 2025
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Description
Marina Vila-Nistal and five co-authors wrote this 2025 study on how well different methods capture the viruses in seawater. Ocean viruses shape whole ecosystems, yet each survey method sees only part of the crowd. The team took a single sample of surface seawater and ran it through four approaches, from short-read and long-read sequencing to reading single viruses one by one.
Together the methods found about 42,000 viral segments, grouped into thousands of species-level units. But the overlap was tiny: under one percent of species showed up in every method. Even the two best methods shared only about a tenth of one method's species. No method alone could assemble one common virus in full; only pooling all data did it. The authors urge care in comparing studies that used different lenses, and favor pairing two sequencing styles.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Marina Vila-Nistal, Francisco Martinez-Hernandez, Monica Lluesma-Gomez, Oscar Fornas, Simon Roux, Manuel Martinez-Garcia |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 50 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |