Unveiled: Earth’s viral diversity

Plumbing Earth’s microbial diversity requires learning more about the poorly-studied relationships between microbes and the viruses that infect them, impacting their abilities to regulate global cycles. Researchers utilized the largest collection of assembled metagenomic datasets to uncover over 125,000 partial and complete viral genomes. This single effort increases the number of known viral genes by a factor of 16, and provides researchers with a unique resource of viral sequence information.