Institut Pasteur, Unité Biologie Moléculaire du Gène chez les Extrêmophiles, 28 rue du Dr Roux, 75015 Paris, France.
Biochem Soc Trans. 2011 Jan;39(1):82-8. doi: 10.1042/BST0390082.
Archaeal viruses, or archaeoviruses, display a wide range of virion morphotypes. Whereas the majority of those morphotypes are unique to archaeal viruses, some are more widely distributed across different cellular domains. Tailed double-stranded DNA archaeoviruses are remarkably similar to viruses of the same morphology (order Caudovirales) that infect many bacterial hosts. They have, so far, only been found in one phylum of the archaea, the Euryarchaeota, which has led to controversial hypotheses about their origin. In the present paper, we describe the identification and analysis of a putative provirus present in the genome of a mesophilic thaumarchaeon. We show that the provirus is related to tailed bacterial and euryarchaeal viruses and encodes a full complement of proteins that are required to build a tailed virion. The recently discovered wide distribution of tailed viruses in Euryarchaeota and the identification of a related provirus in Thaumarchaeota, an archaeal phylum which might have branched off before the separation of Crenarchaeota and Euryarchaeota, suggest that an association of these viruses with Archaea might be more ancient than previously anticipated.
古菌病毒，又称古噬菌病毒，具有多样的病毒形态。虽然大多数形态都是古菌病毒所特有的，但也有一些形态更为广泛地分布在不同的细胞领域。有尾双链 DNA 古噬菌病毒与感染许多细菌宿主的相同形态（尾病毒目）的病毒非常相似。迄今为止，它们只在古菌的一个门（广古菌门）中被发现，这导致了关于它们起源的争议性假说。在本文中，我们描述了在一种嗜热古菌基因组中发现的一个假定前病毒的鉴定和分析。我们表明，该前病毒与有尾细菌和广古菌病毒有关，并编码了构建有尾病毒粒子所需的全套蛋白。最近发现的尾病毒在广古菌中的广泛分布以及在可能在泉古菌和广古菌分离之前就已经分支出来的古菌门（泉古菌门）中发现的相关前病毒表明，这些病毒与古菌的关联可能比之前预期的更为古老。
