Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2020 Apr 9;202(9):e00052-20.
doi: 10.1128/JB.00052-20. Print 2020 Apr 9.

Are There 1031 Virus Particles on Earth, or More, or Fewer?

A R Mushegian  1   2
Affiliations
Review

Are There 1031 Virus Particles on Earth, or More, or Fewer?

A R Mushegian. J Bacteriol. .

Abstract

The number of virus particles on Earth is frequently reported in the scientific literature and in general-interest publications as being on the order of 1031, with some confusion about whether this is a high or low estimate. This number is often given without a source, although it should be attributed to a paper by Hendrix et al. published in 1999 (R. W. Hendrix, M. C. Smith, R. N. Burns, M. E. Ford, and G. F. Hatfull, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 96:2192-2197, 1999, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.96.5.2192). As with any oft-repeated statistic, it is informative to know how it has been derived and whether it should be revised in the light of new evidence. I review the history of the 1031 estimate and use more recent assessments of the number of bacterial and viral particles in various habitats to conclude that the best estimate of the number of virus particles on Earth ("the Hendrix product") remains close to 1031 and is unlikely to be either much less or much more than that.

Keywords: bionumbers; global virome; virion numbers.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

    1. Hendrix RW, Smith MC, Burns RN, Ford ME, Hatfull GF. 1999. Evolutionary relationships among diverse bacteriophages and prophages: all the world’s a phage. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 96:2192–2197. doi:10.1073/pnas.96.5.2192. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Kornberg A. 2000. Ten commandments: lessons from the enzymology of DNA replication. J Bacteriol 182:3613–3618. doi:10.1128/jb.182.13.3613-3618.2000. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Oldstone MB, Levine AJ. 2000. Virology in the next millennium. Cell 100:139–142. doi:10.1016/s0092-8674(00)81690-6. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Enquist LW, Editors of the Journal of Virology . 2009. Virology in the 21st century. J Virol 83:5296–5308. doi:10.1128/JVI.00151-09. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Mushegian AR. 2007. Foundations of comparative genomics. Academic Press, Boston, MA.

Publication types