This study describes the recovery of new Haloquadratum waslbyi isolates and focuses on a family of small plasmids that they commonly carry, which appear to be either haloviruses or at least very closely related to haloviruses. Go to the paper here. Read more about this project (click ‘read more’).

While isolating and sequencing Haloquadratum strains at the MPI (2008-2010) I came across a remarkable family of small plasmids carried by this species. The functions of almost all the genes are unknown but they share a suspiciously high level of similarity to known haloviruses, and since Haloquadratum cells have been observed in the wild to suffer a high level of lytic infections then it is possible these ‘plasmids’ are proviruses. Hopefully this puzzle can be solved in the future.