1 Gene sharing networks to automate genome-based prokaryotic viral taxonomy 2 Ho Bin Jang1*, Benjamin Bolduc1*, Olivier Zablocki1, Jens H. Kuhn2, Simon Roux3, Evelien M. 3 Adriaenssens4, J. Rodney Brister5, Andrew M Kropinski6, 7, Mart Krupovic8, Rob Lavigne9, Dann 4 Turner10, & Matthew B. Sullivan1,11# 5 1 Department of Microbiology, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA 6 2 Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, 7 National Institutes of Health, Fort Detrick, Frederick, MD, USA 8 3 U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, Walnut Creek, CA, USA 9 4 Institute of Integrative Biology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK 10 5 National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of 11 Health, Bethesda, MD, USA 12 6 Department of Pathobiology, Ontario Veterinary College, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada 13 N1G 2W1 14 7 Department of Food Science, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada, N1G 2W1 15 8 Institut Pasteur, Unité Biologie Moléculaire du Gène chez les Extrêmophiles, Department of 16 Microbiology, Paris 75015, France 17 9 Laboratory of Gene Technology, Department of Biosystems, Faculty of BioScience Engineering, KU 18 Leuven, Leuven, Belgium 19 10 Centre for Research in Biosciences, Department of Applied Sciences, Faculty of Health and Applied 20 Sciences, University of the West of England, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol, UK 21 22 11 Department of Civil, Environmental and Geodetic Engineering, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, 23 USA 24 # correspondence to: Matthew Sullivan,
[email protected] 25 * These authors contributed equally to this work. 26 27 ABSTRACT 28 Viruses of bacteria and archaea impact natural, engineered and human ecosystems, but their study is 29 hampered by the lack of a universal or scalable taxonomic framework.