The genome sequence of the classic model halovirus phiH1 has just been published as part of a special thematic issue of Genes. Get the paper here.  There is more to this story (click ‘read more’).

Background: During my time as guest professor at the MPI in Munich (2008-10) I was working with Dieter Oesterhelt and Friedhelm Pfeiffer on Haloquadratum, and I met lots of other German scientists working on haloarchaea. I discovered that Felicitas Pfeifer (TU, Darmstadt) still had stocks of halovirus phiH. Having worked on haloviruses for some years, I knew that the phiH genome sequence had never been completed by Zillig’s group, so this was an excellent opportunity to do so. I asked Felicitas for some virus DNA and that began a collaboration that continued until 2018! Using the existing contigs in Genbank as a starting point, I was able to PCR-sequence across the gaps, and eventually cobbled together the full genome but there remained problems with the earlier sequence data from Zillig’s time. Years later, and with the collaboration of Angela Witte (Wien), and 4200-fold coverage Illumina sequencing, it was possible to say that every base of the 58,072 bp sequence was confidently established. The write-up was a great pleasure and the final manuscript is a credit to all involved.