Scientists Map 5,000 New Ocean Viruses | Hacker News Reader

Scientists Map 5,000 New Ocean Viruses

quantamagazine.org

31 pointstreefire869 comments

> "In the few decades since viruses were first found in the oceans, scientists have only been able to identify a handful of species. A new survey has uncovered nearly all the rest."

My first reaction was "What does 'nearly all the rest' mean and how can one come to such a conclusion?" The article is a basic but interesting writeup about Sullivan and his colleagues did to get there.

I'm concerned that the study may use "out of sample" reasoning in arriving at its virus population count estimate. Here is a snippet from the Quanta article showing some limitations of the sampling / collection methodology:

> In addition, the scientists sequenced only viruses that use DNA to encode their genes. Some viruses, such as influenza and HIV, use RNA, a single-strand version of DNA, to encode their genes. By one estimate, as many as half of the viruses in the ocean are RNA viruses. What’s more, the Tara Oceans survey only took samples from the surface of the ocean. The deeper regions have viruses, too, as does the sediment at the bottom of the sea.

ugh. quanta. That, medium.com, and one other that keeps getting posted to HN news that I can't remember the name... it's all just pablum for the TED crowd.

Here's the original paper which you can't read because it's behind a paywall even though it's research supported by your tax dollars: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/348/6237/1261498

Is there any group lobbying for an open source proviso from results derived from a certain threshold of government research funding? That feels like a no-brainer to me, and one which could have enormously positive economic impact.

As mentioned in https://www.plos.org/open-access/

> There are many other organizations, such as SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Institute) and the Open Society Foundations, that work tirelessly for progress in Open Access. You can find many free resources to help you learn more or to advocate for OA journals in your institution.