Viral metagenomes of Lake Soyang, the largest freshwater lake in South Korea

Abstract

A high number of viral metagenomes have revealed countless genomes of putative bacteriophages that have not yet been identified due to limitations in bacteriophage cultures. However, most virome studies have been focused on marine or gut environments, thereby leaving the viral community structure of freshwater lakes unclear. Because the lakes located around the globe have independent ecosystems with unique characteristics, viral community structures are also distinctive but comparable. Here, we present data on viral metagenomes that were seasonally collected at a depth of 1 m from Lake Soyang, the largest freshwater reservoir in South Korea. Through shotgun metagenome sequencing using the Illumina MiSeq platform, 3.08 to 5.54-Gbps of reads per virome were obtained. To predict the viral genome sequences within Lake Soyang, contigs were constructed and 648 to 1,004 putative viral contigs were obtained per sample. We expect that both viral metagenome reads and viral contigs would contribute in comparing and understanding of viral communities among different freshwater lakes depending on seasonal changes.

Fig. 1

A map depicting the sampling site in Lake Soyang and an overview of the metagenome preparation. The red dot represents the sampling site.

Fig. 2

Taxonomic annotation of virome reads collected from Lake Soyang. The taxonomic prediction of virome reads is shown in the domain level (a). Only the virome reads that were able to be taxonomically classified by MG-RAST using the NCBI RefSeq database are shown here. The “others” shown here means reads that had a significant hit in RefSeq database but could not be assigned to a specific taxon. The reads that were annotated as viruses in (a) were further shown in family levels in (b).