Valerian Dolja has a new paper out in Nature Microbiology titled "Doubling of the known set of RNA viruses by metagenomic analysis of an aquatic virome." In collaboration with NIH and Institut Pasteur colleagues, Valerian published 4 papers this year that are having an immediate impact on the broad field of virology.
This most recent paper doubles the known diversity of RNA viruses and discovers several novel virus lineages using metaviromic analysis of the 10 liters of water from Yangtze River estuary. View PDF.
In another paper that appeared in Microbiol. Mol. Biol. Rev., phylogenomic analysis was used to advance evolution-based comprehensive taxonomic system for the entire global virome. This system, for the first time, unifies a previously patchy picture of isolated virus families and orders and covers all virus ranks, from realm (analogous to domains of cellular life) to kingdoms, down to virus families. This system has been formally accepted by the International Committee for Taxonomy of Viruses and is now is ’the law of the land’. View PDF.
A second paper out in Nature Rev. Microbiol. reconstructs a virome of the Last Universal Cellular Ancestor (LUCA) and contributes to understanding not only the earliest steps in emergence of the contemporary virome, but also to a complex genomic nature of LUCA itself. View PDF.
In a third paper published by Annu. Rev. Phytopathol., the dynamic relationships between viromes of plants, invertebrates and fungi are established and deep evolutionary roots of plant viruses are traced to a period of land colonization. View PDF.