Every day, viruses destroy a huge number of microorganisms in the environment, which changes thestream
It is known from laboratory studies that viruses evolve rapidly to keep up with their hosts, who simultaneously evolve This evolutionary arms race means that they must remain in balance with each other.This is known as the "Black Queen" hypothesis, after a character from Alice in Wonderland.The Black Queen Hypothesis The Red Queen hypothesis), also called the "Black Queen Principle", the "Black Queen Effect", or the "Black Queen Race", is an evolutionary hypothesis.It can be formulated as follows: "Relative to the evolutionary system, a species needs constant change and adaptation in order to maintain its existence in the surrounding biological world, which is constantly evolving with it."
The viruses studied by the research groupcome from very unusual habitats on the surface of glaciers and ice sheets - cryoconite holes. These small pools of melt water on glaciers are ideal places to test the evolution of viruses because they are miniature reproducible communities of microbes that are found on far-apart glaciers around the world.
Research shows that glacier viruses in the Alps, Greenland, and Svalbard have genomes that are nearly identical in these isolated locations. Credit: Christopher Bellas
When the researchers studied the genomes of viruses from isolated cryoconite holes located thousands of kilometers apartThey expected to find that each of them would contain different viruses, only distantly related to each other.In fact, they found that most bacterial infectious viruses (bacteriophages) are virtually identical in the Arctic and the Alps.However, when they took a closer look at their stable genomes, they saw that each had many small regions where the DNA of other related viruses had been repeatedly swapped as part of recombination.At every other location, the viruses shuffled the genes present in these replaceable regions.
"This means that in the natural environment, the exchange of genes between viruses by recombination createsThere is a great deal of diversity in the viral population, especially in genes that are involved in recognizing and attaching to different hosts.This likely gives the viruses the ability to quickly adapt to different hosts in the environment," concludesChristopher Bellas.
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