Earth and Biological Sciences Directorate, Pacific Northwest National Lab, Richland, Washington, USA.
School of Biological Sciences, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, USA.
Glob Chang Biol. 2024 Oct;30(10):e17524. doi: 10.1111/gcb.17524.
Biogeochemical models for predicting carbon dynamics increasingly include microbial processes, reflecting the importance of microorganisms in regulating the movement of carbon between soils and the atmosphere. Soil viruses can redirect carbon among various chemical pools, indicating a need for quantification and development soil carbon models that explicitly represent viral dynamics. In this opinion, we derive a global estimate of carbon potentially released from microbial biomass by viral infections in soils and synthesize a quantitative soil carbon budget from existing literature that explicitly includes viral impacts. We then adapt known mechanisms by which viruses influence carbon cycles in marine ecosystems into a soil-explicit framework. Finally, we explore the diversity of virus-host interactions during infection and conceptualize how infection mode may impact soil carbon fate. Our synthesis highlights key knowledge gaps hindering the incorporation of viruses into soil carbon cycling research and generates specific hypotheses to test in the pursuit of better quantifying microbial dynamics that explain ecosystem-scale carbon fluxes. The importance of identifying critical drivers behind soil carbon dynamics, including these elusive but likely pervasive viral mechanisms of carbon redistribution, becomes more pressing with climate change.
生物地球化学模型越来越多地用于预测碳动态，这些模型包含微生物过程，反映了微生物在调节土壤和大气之间碳迁移方面的重要性。土壤病毒可以改变各种化学库之间的碳分配，这表明需要对土壤碳模型进行量化和开发，这些模型需要明确表示病毒动态。在本观点中，我们根据土壤中病毒感染导致的微生物生物量潜在碳释放情况进行了全球估计，并综合了现有文献中明确包含病毒影响的定量土壤碳预算。然后，我们将病毒影响海洋生态系统碳循环的已知机制改编为适用于土壤的框架。最后，我们探讨了感染过程中病毒-宿主相互作用的多样性，并设想了感染模式如何影响土壤碳命运。我们的综合分析突出了阻碍将病毒纳入土壤碳循环研究的关键知识差距，并提出了具体的假设，以检验更好地量化解释生态系统尺度碳通量的微生物动态的方法。随着气候变化，确定土壤碳动态的关键驱动因素变得更加紧迫，包括这些难以捉摸但可能普遍存在的病毒碳再分配机制。
