Marine virus-like particles and microbes : a linear interpretation

© The Author(s), 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Frontiers in Microbiology 9 (2018): 358, doi:10.3389/fmicb.2018.00358.
Viruses are key players in ocean ecology and biogeochemistry, not only because of their functional roles but also partially due to their sheer abundance (Fuhrman, 1999; Wilhelm and Suttle, 1999). Because viruses cannot replicate without their hosts' machinery, their abundance is inextricably related to that of their (mostly microbial) hosts. The relationship between viral and microbial abundances is thus of great interest.