Around deep-sea hydrothermal vents bacteria and viruses are in the midst of a war.
The viruses infect bacterial cells in hopes of getting their "hands" on elemental sulfur stored within, a University of Michigan news release reported.
The viruses force the bacteria to burn this sulfur and then use the energy to replicate until the bacteria cells burst.
"Our findings suggest that viruses in the dark oceans indirectly access vast energy sources in the form of elemental sulfur," University of Michigan marine microbiologist and oceanographer Gregory J. Dick, said in the news release.
The research team looked at how these viruses affect the ecosystem. The researchers believe they encourage the evolution of chemosynthetic systems by "swapping genes with bacteria," the news release reported.
"We suggest that the viruses serve as a reservoir of genetic diversity that helps shape bacterial evolution," Dick said.
Similar types of microbial interaction have been witnessed before, but in shallower waters. This is the first time this type of chemosynthetic system has been known to rely on only inorganic compounds, instead of sunlight.
The researchers collected water samples at a depth of 6,000 feet below around thermal vents that spew mineral-rich water. The team then sequenced the genomes of the viruses and bacteria found in the samples. They found genes of five previously unknown viruses.
"We hypothesize that the viruses enhance bacterial consumption of this elemental sulfur, to the benefit of the viruses," co-author Melissa Duhaime, an assistant research scientist in the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology said in the news release.
The researchers believe the viruses prey on SUP05; their genes are closely related to SUP05 genes that extract energy from sulfur compounds.
These genes, dubbed auxiliary metabolic genes, work to process the stored sulfur.
"We suspect that these viruses are essentially hijacking bacterial cells and getting them to consume elemental sulfur so the viruses can propagate themselves," Karthik Anantharaman, a doctoral student in Dick's lab at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences said in the news release.
"There seems to have been an exchange of genes, which implicates the viruses as an agent of evolution. That's interesting from an evolutionary biology standpoint," Dick said.
