A new study gets scientists closer to more fully understanding where viruses fit into the global ocean picture of cycling nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and, of particular interest, carbon. Researchers report on their creation of a catalog of genes that viruses ‘stole’ from the marine microbes they infected across all of the world’s oceans, identifying and organizing almost 23,000 genes known as auxiliary metabolic genes (AMGs), including over 7,000 never previously documented.
