Publications by authors named "Kevin X Zhong"

The Pacific oyster is the most widely cultured shellfish worldwide, but production has been affected by mortality events, including in hatcheries that supply the seed for growers. Several pathogens cause disease in oysters, but in many cases, mortality events cannot be attributed to a single agent and appear to be multifactorial, involving environmental variables and microbial interactions. As an organism's microbiome can provide resilience against pathogens and environmental stressors, we investigated the microbiomes in cohorts of freshly settled oyster spat, some of which experienced notable mortality.

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Virus-induced host lysis contributes up to 40% of total prokaryotic mortality and plays crucial roles in shaping microbial composition and diversity in the ocean. Nonetheless, what taxon-specific cell lysis is caused by viruses remains to be studied. The present study, therefore, examined the taxon-specific cell lysis and estimated its contribution to the variations in the rare and abundant microbial taxa.

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Vibrio natriegens strain PWH3a, isolated from the Texas Gulf Coast, is used as a model organism in marine microbiology. Here, we report the complete genome sequence of strain PWH3a, which has two circular chromosomes, 4,650 coding sequences, 34 rRNA, 4 noncoding RNA (ncRNA), 131 tRNA genes, and one Mu-like prophage sequence.

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Microbes are by far the dominant biomass in the world's oceans and drive biogeochemical cycles that are critical to life on Earth. The composition of marine microbial communities is highly dynamic, spatially and temporally, with consequent effects on their functional roles. In part, these changes in composition result from viral lysis, which is taxon-specific and estimated to account for about half of marine microbial mortality.

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Background: The microbiome affects the health of plants and animals, including humans, and has many biological, ecological, and evolutionary consequences. Microbiome studies typically rely on sequencing ribosomal 16S RNA gene fragments, which serve as taxonomic markers for prokaryotic communities; however, for eukaryotic microbes this approach is compromised, because 18S rRNA gene sequences from microbial eukaryotes are swamped by contaminating host rRNA gene sequences.

Results: To overcome this problem, we developed CRISPR-Cas Selective Amplicon Sequencing (CCSAS), a high-resolution and efficient approach for characterizing eukaryotic microbiomes.

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Pelagic cyanobacteria are key players in the functioning of aquatic ecosystems, and their viruses (cyanophages) potentially affect the abundance and composition of cyanobacterial communities. Yet, there are few well-described freshwater cyanophages relative to their marine counterparts, and in general, few cyanosiphoviruses (family ) have been characterized, limiting our understanding of the biology and the ecology of this prominent group of viruses. Here, we characterize S-LBS1, a freshwater siphovirus lytic to a phycoerythrin-rich isolate (Strain TCC793).

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