 think tech away civil engagement lives here okay we're back we're live it's either one o'clock block on a given Monday here for research in Manoa we have two researchers that we have Christopher Schwartz and we have Grieg Stewart they're both at Seymour and Seymour is the center for microbial oceanography research and education you're impressed aren't you this is not a household word nicely done check but we so we see so much as Seymour and we see so much of Dave Karl that we we like Seymour and we like anybody works at Seymour so before this you probably you know didn't like viruses you may change your mind about that okay so we have two slides you want to show you to sort of orient you with what's going on in viruses in the ocean at Seymour and on the Kilo Moana and the KOK whatever it is those two ships that are UH ships and you guys go do research at Station Aloha with those ships to find out more about viruses in the seawater out there and I mean I wonder if the viruses out there are the same as the viruses in the middle yeah it's a big question for us how different viruses may be adapted to different habitats yeah so you know this reminds me of a show we once had with about something about computers and so we got a call and the guy said you're talking about computers but you haven't talked about electricity what what is electricity and I turned to my my co-host and I said this one's for you so Christopher what's a virus so a virus it's basically the simplest forms have a genome composed of nucleic acid so this is the the molecule that contains the blueprint for how to make another virus and that is packaged within a protein shell to protect it from the environment until it encounters its new host so that's sort of the simplest form just the blueprints protected in a protein shell of course viruses can range greatly in size and complexity which is part of what we're trying to learn more about the diversity of these different viruses in the environment are they are they living so I know that's a hard question I think you know some would would simply just say no although others there has been some debate when you look at some of these more complex and large viruses but they are very distinct from cells which are living so so typically they're considered not living because they don't have chemical metabolism to create energy and maintain themselves and we know viruses cause colds and worse and diseases Ebola for example but are all viruses dangerous and deadly to human beings the vast majority are not if you look at the majority of life on the planet is microbial so bacteria and other single-celled organisms and because they're numerically dominant on our planet the viruses that infect those organisms are dominant within the viral community okay and you guys are studying viruses in the ocean it's part it you wouldn't consider it a microbial thing would you is a mic it's a virus microbial or is that a microbe is a virus a microbe as a virus is a virus okay as he said that's on this threshold of are they living are they not living I like to think of them more as molecular parasites rather than living organisms so it hesitate to call them a microorganism even though they're down in that size range that you find other living cells like bacteria and protests and why do we want to study them well because they control everything okay now you know it was amazing to me to find out that 98% of my body was water I found that out when I was younger but then it was more amazing when I found out that a good part of my body is bacteria yes that was that was also shocking but then I found out that no it's also is viruses of the good party my viruses my body is viruses yeah so can you place viruses you know can you help us understand where viruses fit in you know in the landscape of life of human beings and other life or in our in our world where are they what do they do where well we think viruses probably arose the first viruses were there at the very dawn of life whenever the first cells arose there were probably these parasitic elements that were taking advantage of what the cells were doing in order to replicate themselves more simply with opportunistic opportunistic so they've probably been there from the beginning although new viruses probably have arisen over the billions of years that life's been on the planet new ones may arise but I think the first ones were there at the very beginning do we need viruses well if you like being human then you're very happy about viruses these viruses have been driving evolution since the dawn of life and you mentioned how you know we're surprising to find out how much water we are and then how many microbes are in and on us and then there are viruses associated with those microbes which aren't harming us but actually probably helping the microbiome but then you don't think about just the organism you look think about the genome of the organism and the human genome is just littered with snippets of endogenous retroviral elements so past over millions and millions of years past viral infections that get into cells tinker with the genome insert themselves in the genome cause gene duplication gene interruptions they're essentially architects engineers of genetic material and they're constantly infecting every form of life on this planet every day every second viruses are interacting with host cells and basically doing genetic experimentation and we're one and product of that so all the mutation you hear about in the DNA and all that that's got to have a virus involved I mean a virus is responsible for the mutation of the DNA not all of it that they are they do have some major influences and well known mechanisms by which viruses can influence genetic material but if they're not responsible for every genetic part of the mix yes they're a major part of the mix yeah of how DNA changes and then once those DNA changes that's when natural selection can interact with that to drive evolution why why do you want to study this I mean you have to wear gloves more to keep ourselves clean keep the samples clean yeah thankfully working with viruses that infect microbes because viruses are very species specific they only infect usually one type of species and very closely related organisms we don't have to worry about them harming us at all which makes working on marine viruses much more I guess easy and enjoyable yeah we don't need to wear the biosafety level for in the space suits and everything because we know they can't infect us because of their specificity yeah most of them out there in the ocean unless you've got contamination from sewage or something spilling water it's just the natural marine community those viruses aren't going to harm us that's a good thing because there are so many out there well that's yeah I wanted to get to that yeah this is a million billion million billion I mean how many are there 50 million and a teaspoon in a tea so water and then the next teaspoon another 50 million and not all the same kind not all the same kind vast diversity of all different types of viruses and sizes and different types of genomes seawaters loaded with them we have an image to help try let's look at images now so let's see oh look at yeah so that's my finger with a small they see that whitish clear plastic cube on the tip of my finger I cut that cube out of plastic to represent a very small volume water so if you had a drop of surface seawater approximately that size tiny little drop of seawater and you took some DNA stain to make DNA fluorescent so you could stain all the microbes and viruses in there and then squashed it flat and looked in the microscope you would see what you see in the background which is those bright green dots which are all the bacteria in a drop that small those are all bacteria and then the teeny tiny little specs like stars in the background behind that there are 10 times more of those those are all viruses that you get in a single little drop of seawater like that it's about a thousand viruses in each drop and about a hundred bacteria are they naturally green or is that just the way it was stained that's because of the fluorescent stain that we added to the sample yeah now so they are team the ocean is teeming with them so every time it's nice to think about that when you're out there swimming every time you get a speck of seawater on your skin that size you can think my gosh there's a hundred bacteria and a thousand viruses in that drop and we go out and swim through it thank goodness viruses are very specific so none of those ones we saw there were bacteria but you should still take a shower after you swim still always a good idea to take a shower after you swim so if station aloha and those ships or university ships go out what a couple of hundred miles away from Oahu and kilometers north hundred kilometers to the northwest I guess northeast whatever up there there's a lot of teaspoons of water between here and there and are they all diverse in other words if there are 50 million in one teaspoon there'd be an awful lot of water between here and station aloha so and then if I expand that to all oceans all seas there's an awful lot of diversity in viruses I mean it's like incalculable yeah it's a huge number of yeah to some degree that's it's going to be correlated to the community of organisms living in that ecosystem so the more diverse the microbes and other organisms in that system it's more likely that the viruses in that community are also going to be more diverse because their species specific so more different things to infect the more possibilities for different types of viruses to be there so if I go out into the woods say in Manoa and my wife is really good she can identify pretty much every plant that's there if I go out into that teaspoon can I identify every virus that's there do we know is there a little book of viruses I have known we know what's in the teaspoon crudely I would say a large pretty large fraction of the viruses that we see are those that infect bacteria and a lot of those we have a better handle on who they are you can you can get some clues just by looking at them because a large proportion of the viruses that infect bacteria have certain morphological characteristics like tails of different sizes and types that you can look at say okay I can identify that to the family by shape yeah just by the shape you're gonna see some aren't we yeah but that only gets you so far because you can have extraordinary genetic at the DNA level they can be extremely quite different even for viruses with a similar shape and the problem is I don't know what the fraction is maybe half of them have those recognizable shapes the rest just look so simple a lot of the viruses have very simple morphologies so you would have no idea if these two things you're looking at it with similar shapes are closely related or not it's pretty tricky so that's why we do a lot of work with DNA sequencing and RNA sequencing you're looking at the DNA of the virus yeah and distinguishing it and seeing what its character is DNA or the RNA depending on the type of virus that's pretty exciting yeah electron microscope yeah also how we do the morphological assessment or how do they look we need to use an electron so you can just go wish yeah yeah so you guys were you wrote a paper we have a slide about this we have a graphic normally what's the next graphic why don't you show it it's it's it about the paper ah it's about viruses oh some examples of those electron microscope images on the right hand side and these are all viruses isolated from either Kaneohe Bay or station Aloha and these all infect different types of phytoplankton on the left hand side you can see cultures of phytoplankton to isolate the viruses first you need to isolate the phytoplankton so we grow a diverse array of phytoplankton and then spike in viruses from the environment to try to see if we can infect them and then that leads us to this very assortment of all sorts of viruses with very large range and sizes and that those are the viruses at the right of this yeah exactly and that's that's that's a relative size so you have one that's really small to lower right you have one that's quite large in the top left yeah exactly those are all using the same scale so you can directly compare their sizes these are all ones that you've isolated yep on different species of phytoplankton growing in waters around Hawaii got a diverse array of different types of phytoplankton are many different kinds grow them up challenge them with a virus sample and see if the culture dies well I know with plankton I can I can grow that yeah right I can I can grow it and with bacteria I can make a colony and grow that yeah can I do that with a virus can I have the virus replicate can I control that and have lots of virus from one little virus to do that you need you need that host culture so that plankton culture the whole because they're always opportunistic they need a host in order to it's the only way they can replicate yeah so that is their source of material and energy is that cells you have to instead of you know like with bacteria we put some nutrients on a petri dish and the bacteria grow on that for a virus the cell is the medium on which they grow so within which they grow it doesn't make you want to like virus though they're opportunistic the predatory you know but yeah but you guys in you discovered one that had not been discovered that's the big story here what's the name of the virus you discovered have you given it a name so we call it tetrasilmus virus one or tech v1 because it infects a green algae from the genus tetrasilmus and this is one that's considered to be quite large relative to your average virus so someone call it a giant virus that makes it more interesting now that's right and they are big I mean we knew there were large viruses before but it's only been in I don't what's it been now to 15 years already on time flies but that's still relatively recent when we started seeing this upper limit of how big a virus can be start to creep upwards and it's been pretty exciting because the bigger they get the more they can do and you know our conception of viruses you know we used to say the average size of the virus in the ocean is around 50 nanometer and these things are 10 times bigger than that you know so it's like we used to think viruses are the size of a marble and now we're finding basketballs I think I think all related Greek it could it be that all the virus like it's like all the dogs in the world you know our dogs they're the same species they're you know similar DNA and all that are all viruses related did one little virus start way back when and mutated to all the multi-million kinds viruses we have now that seems unlikely which is another thing that distinguishes viruses from all the living things or all other organisms we know of it there seems to be a common ancestor for all living organisms viruses are different because it appears they have arisen multiple times at different times there are big clusters of types of viruses like a lot of the double-stranded DNA containing viruses they have double-stranded DNA is their genome just like we do in all other living organisms those viruses seem to have some common ancestry for most of them but then you have entirely different types of virus so they have RNA for a genome which is unheard of in the world of organisms living things they've got a single-stranded RNA could be double-stranded RNA could be single-stranded DNA this is the part where I tell you my head is beginning to hurt mine too this is your profession Greek Stewart is the the leader of the laboratory Chris Schwartz is a researcher there defending his PhD in short order wish you well on that we're going to take a short break so I can deal with my headache and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk more about your paper your discovery and what's out there what you have found we'll be right back hello I'm Dave Stevens host of the cyber underground this is where we discuss everything that relates to computers it's just kind of scare you out of your mind so come join us every week here on thinktecawaii.com 1 p.m. on Friday afternoons and then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube just look up the cyber underground on YouTube all our shows will show up and please follow us we're always giving you current relevant information to protect you keep a new safe Aloha I'm Yukari Kunisue I'm your host of new Japanese language show on thinktecawaii called Konnichiwa Hawaii broadcasting live every other Monday at 2 p.m. please join us where we discuss important and useful information for the Japanese language community in Hawaii the show will be all in Japanese hope you can join us every other Monday at 2 p.m. Aloha okay I told you going back and I feel better now I'm beginning to integrate all this information so we have the slide of the paper yeah yes can we look at the paper so we can see what okay what is that is this the title of your paper you guys this is actually more of a summary description of the paper but there's the information for its publication and virology so let me let me unpack that genomic characterization we're looking at the genetic structure of this virus that's right it's a novel virus is that what does novel mean is it because you just found it or or because it's different from anything we ever found before in this case it's the first from this family that infects this type of organism so there are a few from this family that we this type of virus family that infect algae but none that infect this type of algae but other characteristics that make it novel are the genes that it encodes in the genome which are genes that we haven't seen in viruses before and that's one of the exciting things about studying these so-called giant viruses is that their genomes are so large they encode so many genes that a lot of them are able to manipulate their host in different ways than than the simplest viruses wouldn't be able to so the bigger the smarter smarter maybe the wrong word okay can we see it again as more words we have to unpack okay giant we talked about that before and infecting you know you use that and tetraselmas is the kind of green algae that you're using for the for the experiment exact but when you say infect infect is you know it gives me a little cold chill down my infect is a bad thing isn't this infect mean damage or destroy what does infect mean in this context for these algae because they're single cells an infection almost always means death or lysis that the cell after the virus replicates inside of the cell it reaches a limit and then it bursts the cell and those viruses are released there are other infection strategies that viruses can employ for example perhaps environmental conditions aren't suitable for growth of their host so they'd rather hide out inside the host and tell conditions for growth of the host are better in which case they can sort of integrate their genome into the genome of the host and divide with it so they're sort of lying dormant and we call that different strategies different strategy a different damage to the host with different strategies yeah the sleeper would not immediately damage the host yeah right it could be an example for for humans for example an aggressively lytic one for one strategy would be something like Ebola virus which just gets in replicates lysis the cell causes damage spreads to other cells infects lysis and just rapidly spreads and killing cells in the larger context isn't that silly why if the if the if the virus was being rational why would the virus want to kill its host wouldn't wouldn't want to preserve its host so it could continue to feed off the host i'm really you know this is a great knowledgeable about this but i'm just asking great questions and puzzles and thinking about viral ecology is thinking about well you're right in some sense if the virus is absolutely dependent upon its host to replicate and yet it's killing it that seems to be really detrimental to self-preservation by the virus but um so you have to think about what under what conditions is that strategy useful and it tends to be whenever you have lots and lots of that particular host around there's a high concentration of those types of cells around therefore the virus it's going to do the best is one that gets in makes copies of itself say a hundred new viruses pop out and all of them can quickly find a new host and infect that a new person in the case of Ebola yeah but it will tend to burn out because you'll start to run low on hosts but it's a self-regulating thing because as the host concentration goes down the ability of the new virus is coming out to find another host to infect drops dramatically and this epidemic infection and will subside until a host can recover and then it starts over again so am i right to to think that one of the at least one of the things you're after here is to understand the dynamics of viruses in general um this is one way to do it with the giant virus and all that but you want to know more about viruses because viruses do affect humans and although these viruses would not affect humans you learn lessons from studying these viruses that might help yeah and studying viruses that affect humans not am i right do you think about this yeah it is all related our main motivation is more to yeah it is to understand the incredible diversity of viruses that are all around us we focus on the ocean but they're everywhere uh and understanding how they influence life including humans so some of this novel principles we may uncover studying marine viruses uh could apply to what we know about human viruses is this a fast-moving area i guess it is if you're working at the front of it right now it is and like five years ago do we know what was going on here ten years ago do we know what was going on uh in terms of yeah i think you know the dynamics of viruses that you're studying right now yeah we had a pretty good idea it was i think this field and marine viruses in particular and viral ecology in the environment like in seawater probably really started taking off slowly around 1989-1990 which is about when i was starting grad school and i got hooked on it uh and since then it's it's taken a while it's sort of one of these slow burn things and then now the research is really heating up and it seems like it's hard to keep up these days it was a lot of it's a lot easier when i first started i feel bad for chris because the literature coming out on this topic is enormous past decade and it just keeps going up well it's just where else is this happening in hawaii and uh simore great place southwest uh higp i mean these are world-class organizations you're working at the front end but is it is other people in other schools doing similar research are they also looking at um novel giant viruses the way you are yeah yeah um all across the world and trying to find these giant viruses in different environments too there was even a study that found giant viruses in permafrost um that was i think close to 20 000 years old and they revived it infecting this amoeba organism uh so yeah i think especially with today the genetic tools that have advanced to the point where it's very affordable to sequence viruses um as greek mentioned earlier it's hard to really learn that much about them just looking at their morphology but now that we can easily sequence their genome uh we can learn about them so much quicker learn about their diversity in the environment and then looking at specific viruses sequencing their genome learning more about what individual viruses can do that others can't exciting exciting to be involved exciting to have you in the studio although i am going to take a shower later on so let's look at the rest of your slides so we don't miss anything let's see what else we got somebody tell me what that is so on the left here um we have rather green water that was photographed in Waimanalo uh during a bloom of green algae which we suspect is tetrasilmus and when we say they bloom basically the nutrients are high enough that these green algae reproduce so rapidly that they reach high concentrations and accumulate to the point where the water turns green um and and the inset on that image you can see the tetrasilmus cells those green little cells that's through a light microscope yeah and the little picture the insert on the right hand side looks like a picture of what we saw before exactly it's the same virus as was on the earlier picture yeah yeah so that's the virus um that this study that's the one you study exactly and the larger image is that tetrasilmus host it's an infected cell and it's where we cut the cell into in half pretty much and look at what's inside of it so that's imaged using a transmission electron microscope so this is the inside contents of an infected cell and you can see those little balls in the middle of it which are the virus particles that are reproducing sometimes it's referred to having a virus factory where they're being produced and assembled within the cell what about the three big balls the four big balls at the left what are the what are those so those i'm not too certain whether those are uh yeah you can some other organelles that are probably normal parts of the normal parts of the cells you can see yeah you can see this layered structure on the electron micrograph you know where see where the arrow is pointing yeah just to the left of what it's pointing at that layered structure there yeah that's the chloroplast which is what the cell uses that's what tetrasilmus uses is to do photosynthesis that's the way to sell so these range uh around five to eight microns micrometers how big is that give me a comparison so i know it had wide that big you have a slide to that so we do actually the next slide there we go you a sense okay ah okay so these are actually different images overlaid on each other so that we can directly compare the size of these different things as you can see that the human here and the size of these tetrasilmus cells those little green balls relative to the human hair and then in the background if you look closely enough there's sort of these light green dots and those are the tetrasilmus virus the tet v virus particles and those that particular image was taken by staining their DNA with that fluorescent stain where they show up as green um and you're probably thinking yourself wait you said this was a giant virus yeah but those are tiny little it's all relative it's all relative you call them giant viruses just because they are bigger than the average size of most viruses um and they are what we call giant viruses or those that get up into the size range of other living organisms like small bacteria okay what about kanioi bay and limonado here so tet v was isolated from water in kanioi bay and we can see blooms of its host in places like limonado like the image earlier and here we have a few different examples showing that green water from the extremely high concentration of these cells these green algae so the picture on the left is that that's the water with the algae yes what's the picture on the right uh another water sample okay it's the same all examples of the same condition of algae yeah and that becomes important for the fact that this particular alga frequently grows to such high concentrations and population densities is part of we think what's important about understanding the ecology of the virus as well and the most sort of novel and interesting thing about this particular virus is that when we sequence the genome and we're looking at the the genes encoded we found that it had the code for enzymes used by the host to do fermentation so they had enzymes for green alga fermentation pathways which was really surprising why would a virus want to keep these genes used in an algal fermentation and one of our theories is that it could actually help the virus spread through these algal blooms so when algae reach extremely high concentrations it increases the chances that that environment might go hypoxic or the oxygen concentrations might go so low that they might need to do fermentation which is to create energy in the absence of oxygen so in this cartoon shown on the slide here you can imagine you've got this bloom of the green algae if a virus were to try to spread through such a bloom these cells would start lysing releasing organic matter now that becomes food for bacteria living in that same environment so they start chewing on the organic matter and that draws down oxygen even further so you have bacteria releasing all this organic the bacterial concentrations in the water go up and they're respiring just like we respire the bacteria eat organics blow off co2 we your organics blow off co2 so be put like putting you go from one person in a sealed room this size to put a hundred people in suddenly you see all the doors and windows the oxygen level will start to go down just because of the respiration so the bacteria are using oxygen and releasing co2 we're about out of time you guys gree and chris um but i just want to ask you one question again i'm totally naive about this stuff um well there's the credits of the national science foundation and so west and and seamar that's an appropriate slide yeah my question is you know for years um we tried including in hawaii there were a number of firms that were financed to do research and investigation into making lipid oil out of out out of algae okay and they couldn't actually come up with an algae that would yield sufficient lipid oil um to to make it work in a commercial setting like for jet fuel and that sort of thing can these viruses have an effect on the bacteria and the algae in order to change the characteristics of the algae could you could you um actually do could you customize an algae using the techniques you're looking at now that is it possible yeah viruses are frequently used as tools for genetic engineering and it's certainly possible that if you've got a virus that infects a certain specific host that you're interested in manipulating having a virus that's capable of injecting its DNA is one possible way of manipulating the genetics of the host system and changing its metabolism to do what you want and can you actually change the virus can you splice the genes in the virus change the way it engages with the host yeah and therefore the how it might change the host yeah that's yeah and it's interesting both from the idea of using the virus as a tool but it's also useful to know about the viruses that infect organisms that are used in biotech for producing lipid oils or in this case tetraselmos is used as a fish feed a lot of these applications involve growing things at very high concentrations and those are just the kind of conditions where a viral infection can really mess you up it'll get in wipe out your product so exciting so much here yeah it sounds like this is only it's an art form only beginning a science only starting uh greeks do it uh christ wartz thank you very much for coming down that's been a pleasure thank you