Max Planck Research Group Protist Virology

Eco­logy and evol­u­tion of vir­uses in uni­cel­lu­lar eu­k­a­ryotes

Mat­thias Fisc­her's team is try­ing to shed light on a very spe­cific group of vir­uses. These are so-called gi­ant vir­uses, which are com­par­able to bac­teria due to their size and the com­plex­ity of their gen­omes. The largest of them can be seen un­der a light mi­cro­scope and con­tain more than a thou­sand genes. So far, only a few gi­ant vir­uses have been de­scribed in de­tail. This is also due to the fact that they mainly in­fect eu­k­a­ryotic mi­croor­gan­isms. This group of or­gan­isms, also known as prot­ists, is an es­sen­tial com­pon­ent of eco­lo­gical food webs but, un­like bac­teria, has been re­searched very little.

"We are spe­cific­ally look­ing for new gi­ant vir­uses that we can mul­tiply along with their hosts in the labor­at­ory in or­der to study their in­fec­tion bio­logy," says Fisc­her. "We then trans­fer the find­ings from our lab stud­ies to the nat­ural en­vir­on­ment of these com­plex vir­uses. This way, we learn a lot about their re­pro­duc­tion strategies, but also about their eco­lo­gical and evol­u­tion­ary sig­ni­fic­ance."

As part of the newly fun­ded ERC pro­ject "CAPSOLU­TION", Fisc­her and his team will in­vest­ig­ate the struc­tural and ge­n­omic di­versity of gi­ant vir­uses in nu­tri­ent-poor moun­tain lakes. Over the next five years, the re­search­ers want to track down prot­ists and their vir­uses in high-moun­tain lakes in the European Alps. They will char­ac­ter­ize the nat­ural com­munit­ies of these mi­croor­gan­isms us­ing elec­tron mi­cro­scopy and Om­ics meth­ods and in­tro­duce new virus-host sys­tems into labor­at­ory cul­ture in or­der to in­vest­ig­ate spe­cific sur­face struc­tures of gi­ant virus particles.