Gene duplication as a major force driving the genome expansion in some giant viruses.

IMPORTANCE: Giant viruses are noteworthy not only due to their enormous particles but also because of their gigantic genomes. In this context, a fundamental question has persisted: how did these genomes evolve? Here we present the discovery of cedratvirus pambiensis, featuring the largest genome ever described for a cedratvirus. Our data suggest that the larger size of the genome can be attributed to an unprecedented number of duplicated genes. Further investigation of this phenomenon in other viruses has illuminated gene duplication as a key evolutionary mechanism driving genome expansion in diverse giant viruses. Although gene duplication has been described as a recurrent event in cellular organisms, our data highlights its potential as a pivotal event in the evolution of gigantic viral genomes.

Putative Promoter Motif Analyses Reinforce the Evolutionary Relationships Among Faustoviruses, Kaumoebavirus, and Asfarvirus.

Putative promoter motifs have been described in viruses belonging to the nucleocytoplasmic large DNA viruses (NCLDVs) group; however, few studies have been conducted to search for promoter sequences in newly discovered amoebal giant viruses. Faustovirus and kaumoebavirus are two Asfarviridae-related giant viruses belonging to the NCLDVs group. The phylogenetic relationships among these viruses led us to investigate if the promoter regions previously identified in the asfarvirus genome could be shared by its amoebal virus relatives. Previous studies demonstrated the role of A/T-rich motifs as promoters of asfarvirus. In this study, we reinforce the importance of A/T rich motifs in asfarvirus and show that the TATTT and TATATA motifs are also shared in abundance by faustovirus and kaumoebavirus. Here, we demonstrate that TATTT and TATATA are mostly present in faustovirus and kaumoebavirus genomic intergenic regions (IRs) and that they are widely distributed at 0 to -100 bp upstream to the start codons. We observed that putative promoter motifs are present as one to dozens of repetitions in IRs of faustovirus, kaumoebavirus, and asfarvirus, which is similar to that described previously for marseilleviruses. Furthermore, the motifs were found in most of the upstream regions of the core genes of faustovirus, kaumoebavirus, and asfarvirus, which suggests that the motifs could already be present in the ancestor of these viruses before the irradiation of this group. Our work provides an in-depth analysis of the putative promoter motifs present in asfarvirus, kaumoebavirus, and faustovirus, which reinforces the relationship among these viruses.