The human gut microbiome is a dense and taxonomically diverse consortium of
microorganisms. While the bacterial components of the microbiome have received …

SUMMARY Fifty years ago, David Baltimore published a brief conceptual paper delineating
the classification of viruses by the routes of genome expression. The six “Baltimore classes” …

A census of the biomass on Earth is key for understanding the structure and dynamics of the
biosphere. However, a global, quantitative view of how the biomass of different taxa …

The human gut microbiome plays an important role in health, but its archaeal diversity
remains largely unexplored. In the present study, we report the analysis of 1,167 …

Host-associated microbial communities have an important role in sha** the health and
fitness of plants and animals. Most studies have focused on the bacterial, fungal or viral …

Viruses are ubiquitous parasites of cellular life and the most abundant biological entities on
Earth. It is widely accepted that viruses are polyphyletic, but a consensus scenario for their …

Bacteriophages from the Inoviridae family (inoviruses) are characterized by their unique
morphology, genome content and infection cycle. One of the most striking features of …

Nearly all organisms are hosts to multiple viruses that collectively appear to be the most
abundant biological entities in the biosphere. With recent advances in metagenomics and …

Viruses and mobile genetic elements are molecular parasites or symbionts that coevolve
with nearly all forms of cellular life. The route of virus replication and protein expression is …

The archaeal tailed viruses (arTV), evolutionarily related to tailed double-stranded DNA
(dsDNA) bacteriophages of the class Caudoviricetes, represent the most common isolates …