Editorial: The role of viruses in marine environments

Paru dans Frontiers in Microbiology

Jin, M., Gong, Y., Geslin, C., He, T., Zhang, X. (2024)

Viruses are the most abundant biological entities in the ocean. They are major players in marine ecosystems, as they control host abundance, influence host diversity and evolution, and affect local and global biogeochemical cycles. In the last decades, research on marine viruses has emerged as a significant and distinct field in marine biology and ecology. The development of advanced metagenomic sequencing methods, analysis pipelines, and tools has led to an increased understanding of the diversity and ecology of viruses in the marine ecosystem. However, there are still unexplored areas of research on viruses in marine environments. The goal of this Research Topic is to provide a forum to advance the study of marine viruses. The Research Topic features eight noteworthy papers focusing on different aspects of marine viruses, including technological optimization for visualizing marine viruses, isolation and characterization of novel marine phages, host-
virus interaction in marine bacteria, crustacean and jellyfish models, and ecology of cyanophages and bathypelagic viruses.