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The "Giant Virus Finder" Discovers an Abundance of Giant Viruses in the Antarctic Dry Valleys

The first giant virus was identified in 2003 from a biofilm of an industrial water-cooling tower in England. Later, numerous new giant viruses were found in oceans and freshwater habitats, some of them having even 2,500 genes. We have demonstrated their very likely presence in four soil samples taken from the Kutch Desert (Gujarat, India). Here we describe a bioinformatics work-flow, called the "Giant Virus Finder" that is capable to discover the very likely presence of the genomes of giant viruses in metagenomic shotgun-sequenced datasets. The new tool is applied to numerous hot and cold desert soil samples as well as some tundra- and forest soils. We show that most of these samples contain giant viruses, and especially many were found in the Antarctic dry valleys. The results imply that giant viruses could be frequent not only in aqueous habitats, but in a wide spectrum of soils on our planet.