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Updated: Jun 28, 2026

Methods for Characterizing the Co-development of Biofilm and Habitat Heterogeneity
Published on: March 11, 2015
Habitat-dependent viral dynamics and auxiliary metabolism in ecological floating beds: implications for
Zuhan Ge1, Saqi Wang2, Nan Zhang3
1College of Environmental & Natural Resource Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, PR China; National Observations and Research Station for Wetland Ecosystems of the Yangtze Estuary, Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, PR China.
None:
Ecological floating beds (EFBs), plant-substrate floating treatment systems, have been widely implemented in aquatic ecological restoration, where microbes play crucial roles in nutrient cycling and material transformation. However, the ecology of viruses in EFBs remains poorly understood. Here, prokaryotic and metagenome-derived viral communities in a full-scale EFB were analyzed over 12 months utilizing 84 samples from biofilms, plant roots, and surrounding water. Viral communities, dominantly by Caudoviricetes (96.7%), exhibited temporal and habitat-dependent responses that contrasted with their prokaryotic hosts. Deterministic processes, primarily temperature and total organic carbon, shaped viral community composition and auxiliary metabolic gene (AMG) repertoires. Temperate viruses were enriched in biofilms and roots (8.91%-13.45%) compared to water (7.75%), indicating distinct interactions with attached prokaryotes and highlighting these niches as potential metabolic hotspots. Virus-host linkage analyses connected viruses to dominant prokaryotes and revealed abundant AMGs (n = 3703; 238 types), including genes implicated in carbon, phosphorus and sulfur transformations. Furthermore, prokaryotic C/N/P/S-cycling gene repertoires showed stronger coupling in attached habitats, whereas viruses carrying element-cycling AMGs were relatively more abundant in water. These findings provide a genome-resolved view of habitat-dependent viral community structure and auxiliary metabolic potential in EFBs, identifying attached habitats as important compartments for future validation of virus-host interactions and their possible links to restoration-related biogeochemical processes.
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