Single-cell-resolved frequency and modes of phage interactions with prokaryoplankton in the tropical surface ocean

Authors

Brown, J. M., Weinheimer, A. R., Poulton, N., Stepanauskas, R.

Abstract

Marine planktonic viruses play critical roles in shaping microbial communities and driving global biogeochemical cycles. However, quantitative, microbiome-wide analyses of marine prokaryoplankton-virus interactions in situ and their ecological impacts remain challenging due to the vast diversity of viral genomes and interaction modes and the limitations of existing methodologies. Here, we utilized GORG-Tropics, a global collection of 12,715 single amplified genomes (SAGs) generated from randomly sampled marine prokaryoplankton cells, to determine the frequency and modes of their interactions with viruses in the tropical surface ocean. We found 4.2% (range 1%-19% among samples) of GORG-Tropics SAGs to contain phage genomic material, with the highest frequency found in productive ocean regions. Prokaryoplankton lineages known to have high metabolic rates, including Prochlorococcus and Rhodobacterales, had a substantially larger fraction of cells associated with viruses (10-12% of SAGs) as compared to the less active but highly abundant lineages including Pelagibacterales (2.2% of SAGs). Cell-virus associations indicative of lysogeny were elevated in Alphaproteobacteria relative to other taxa. The collection of phages recovered from individual SAGs exhibited genomic diversity that bridged order-level taxonomies, indicating high diversity and genomic connectivity within wild phage populations. A substantial fraction of the observed cell-virus associations disagreed with the computationally predicted host identity of the virus, indicative of non-infective interactions. The extent of genetic exchange across tailed bacteriophages infecting different hosts, and connected to taxonomically distant phages provided further evidence for the role of non-infective phage entry in the lateral transfer between tailed phages. This study provides large-scale quantitative evidence of viral infection rates in the collective prokaryoplankton community across the global surface tropical ocean through large-scale identification and quantification of the specific phages, hosts, and modes of interaction at the resolution of individual cells. Our results confirm prior reports on the overall frequency of prokaryoplankton infections with viruses in the oligotrophic tropical surface ocean. Our findings uncover non-infective phage-cell associations that may be contributing to the lateral transfer of viral genes and the nutrition of marine prokaryoplankton.

Preprint server: bioRxiv
The authors list and abstract were imported from bioRxiv on 27 Aug 2026.

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