Viruses of the Archaea

Abstract

Double‐stranded deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) viruses that infect members of the third domain of life, the Archaea, are diverse and exceptional in both their morphotypes and their genomic properties. The majority of characterized species infect hyperthermophilic hosts and carry morphological features which have not been observed for viruses from the other domains of life, the Bacteria and the Eukarya. This exceptional status of the archaeal viruses is reinforced by the finding that a large majority of their predicted genes yield no sequence matches in public sequence databases, and their functions remain unknown. One of the viruses, the bicaudavirus ATV ( Acidianus two‐tailed virus), is quite unique in that it undergoes a major morphological change, growing long tail structures, extracellularly. A small minority of archaeal viruses, which exclusively infect mesophilic or moderately thermophilic hosts, are morphologically similar to head‐tail DNA viruses of bacteria.