C. A. Martinez-Gutierrez

The paper uses single-cell metatranscriptomics to identify the native hosts of giant viruses in marine plankton communities, revealing a rare host-virus relationship and viral control of host population dynamics.

This study reconstructs the timeline of bacterial and archaeal diversification in the ocean, showing major clades diversified over 2.2 billion years with key events linked to oxygen and nutrient changes.

This study shows genome size in bacteria and archaea is strongly influenced by phylogeny, not single evolutionary forces, and ecological factors have limited predictive power.

The paper analyzes 501 metagenome-assembled genomes of giant viruses to reveal their metabolic diversity and evolutionary origins, finding they encode complex metabolic pathways and have virus-specific metabolic genes.

The paper shows that strong purifying selection drives genome streamlining in epipelagic Marinimicrobia by analyzing dN/dS ratios and correlating them with genomic traits.