bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/597468; this version posted April 4, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC 4.0 International license. Metatranscriptomic reconstruction reveals RNA viruses with the potential to shape carbon cycling in soil Evan P. Starr1, Erin E. Nuccio2, Jennifer Pett-Ridge2, Jillian F. Banfield*3,4,5,6,7✢ and Mary K. Firestone*5 ✢Corresponding author:
[email protected] 1Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA 2Nuclear and Chemical Sciences Division, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA, USA 3Department of Earth and Planetary Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA 4Earth Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA 5Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA 6Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, San Francisco, CA, USA 7Innovative Genomics Institute, Berkeley, CA, USA *These authors share senior authorship 1 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/597468; this version posted April 4, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC 4.0 International license. Abstract Viruses impact nearly all organisms on Earth, with ripples of influence in agriculture, health and biogeochemical processes. However, very little is known about RNA viruses in an environmental context, and even less is known about their diversity and ecology in the most complex microbial system, soil.