Article: Viral influence on aquatic bacterial communities.

For many years, viruses were not included in our conceptual models of how natural aquatic ecosystems function. This was primarily because they simply were not observed. However, it was learned about 10 years ago that viruses are highly abundant in such systems, roughly 1010 per liter, or about 10-20 times the bacterial abundance (Bergh et al., 1989; Proctor and Fuhrman, 1990). Because viruses require a host to reproduce, this high abundance raised the obvious question of what organisms these viruses were infecting. Field studies showed that viral counts are much better correlated to bacterial counts than to chlorophyll. Therefore, although viruses infecting eukaryotes ...

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