The discovery of several giant amoeba viruses has opened up a novel area in the field of virology. Despite this, knowledge about ecology of these viruses remains patchy. In this study, we aimed to characterize the diversity of giant viruses in Algeria by inoculating 64 environmental samples on various amoeba strains. After isolation by co-culture with nine amoeba supports, flow cytometry and electron microscopy were used to putatively identify viruses. Definitive identification was performed by PCR and sequencing. Mimiviruses, marseilleviruses, faustoviruses and cedratviruses were the main viruses isolated in this study. Moreover, a new virus, which we named fadolivirus, was also isolated and was found to belong to the recent metagenomic descriptions of Klosneuvirinae. Despite the use of 9 amoeba supports for co-culture, most of the isolates were obtained from two amoebas: Acanthamoeba castellanii Neff and Vermamoeba vermiformis CDC 19. Finally, the viruses most frequently isolated were marseilleviruses (55.5%) and Mimiviruses (22.2%). This work shows that the isolation of viruses previously detected by metagenomic analyses can be tedious, but possible.

中文翻译：

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阿尔及利亚分离到的变形虫相关巨型病毒的多样性

几种巨型变形虫病毒的发现为病毒学领域开辟了一个新领域。尽管如此，关于这些病毒的生态学的知识仍然很少。在这项研究中，我们旨在通过在各种变形虫菌株上接种64个环境样品来表征阿尔及利亚巨型病毒的多样性。与九种变形虫载体共培养分离后，使用流式细胞仪和电子显微镜确定病毒。通过PCR和测序进行确定性鉴定。拟病毒，马赛病毒，短小病毒和雪松病毒是本研究中分离出的主要病毒。此外，还分离了一种新病毒，我们将其命名为fadolivirus，发现该病毒属于Klosneuvirinae的最近宏基因组学描述。尽管使用9种变形虫支持物进行共培养，卡氏棘阿米巴内夫和Vermamoeba vermiformis CDC 19.最后，最常见的孤立的病毒是marseilleviruses（55.5％）和Mimiviruses（22.2％）。这项工作表明，以前通过宏基因组学分析检测到的病毒的分离可能很乏味，但是可能。