It really not that bad imo. I’d rather have Malort than Jaeger or Fireball. But it’s still fun to joke about it.

@natmicrobiol.nature.com

Taken together, our results show that viruses don't just track host populations but actively respond to environmental conditions with degradation and restoration. Integrating viruses into restoration monitoring will strengthen our ability to assess and enhance peatland ecosystem recovery.

We then show that virus-host abundance trends across several host phyla change with ecosystem health. And, the proportion of temperate viruses increase in damaged soils, which have greater microbial growth rates than natural ones, suggesting piggyback-the-winner dynamics prevail in damaged peatlands

Protein clusters largely contained proteins encoded by viruses from soils of the same ecosystem health. And, specific protein families and auxiliary metabolic genes differed across natural, restored, and damaged soils, showing that viral protein functions are finely tuned to ecosystem health.

Differential abundance analysis across ecosystem health showed more damaged-enriched viruses than restored or natural. And, viral trends often diverged from their hosts, especially for certain C and S cyclers, showing that viral responses to degradation and restoration don't just mirror host shifts.

Most viral species appeared at multiple sites, but 54% were endemic to a single ecosystem health status (natural, damaged, or restored). Many genomes also clustered with viruses from other soil databases, suggesting a shared soil viral "backbone" plus strong local adaptation to ecosystem health.

There were several interesting findings! First, PCoA of viral communities showed geography as the main driver of community composition. But ecosystem health also significantly shaped peatland viral communities across the UK.

But the roles of viruses in peatland ecology and recovery were still not understood. @karthik-a.bsky.social and I collaborated with Ashish and Will to examine the relationships between viral communities, their microbial hosts, and environmental factors in natural, damaged, and restored peatlands.

@ashish-malik.bsky.social and his student Will Pallier sampled peatlands spanning a gradient of ecosystem health. They asked how microbial ecophysiology influences carbon fluxes and responds to peatland degradation and restoration. You can read their pre-print here www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Peatlands store 1/3 of Earth’s soil carbon, but drainage can turn them from carbon sinks to sources and accelerate climate change. Restoration aims to reverse that. Since soil microbiomes regulate carbon cycling, understanding how they respond to recovery is crucial for monitoring restoration.

Thank you Ashish! That means a lot, coming from you 🙂

Beautiful!!!

I also really like the feature that links publications to the annotations obtained for each gene. Really useful. Nice work!

Hi Yunha. Just tried this with a MAG from one of my datasets. I'm super impressed by how fast it annotated the whole genome. How does SeqHub obtain its HMM and embedding-based annotations so quickly? Just curious, because it blew me away!