Professor Konstantin Severinov co-authored a paper in “Host-Associated Phages Disperse across the Extraterrestrial Analogue Antarctica” that has been recently published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology journal. The scientists hypothesized that dispersal of host-associated bacteriophages across the Antarctic continent can be tracked via their genetic signatures, aiding our understanding of virus and host dispersal across long distances. Phage genome fragments (PGFs) reconstructed from surface snow metagenomes of three Antarctic stations were assigned to four host genomes, mainly Betaproteobacteria, including Ralstonia spp. The researchers reconstructed the complete genome of a temperate phage with nearly complete alignment to a prophage in the reference genome of Ralstonia pickettii 12D. PGFs from different stations were related to each other at the genus level and matched similar hosts. The results suggest that host-associated phages, especially of Ralstonia sp., disperse over long distances despite the harsh conditions of the Antarctic continent. Full text of the paper is available here.