Back when I was rewriting (don't ask) my review on phage evolution and ecology , which I wrote immediately following the publication of my evolution and ecology book , I became interested in phage genome lengths, particularly as a function of phage virion morphological types.
This curiosity turned into a figure in a paper, an article which I had imagined would have been rejected on the basis of its title alone (it's available open access; click the call out found at the end of the reference):
Abedon, S. T. (2011). Size Does Matter – Distinguishing Bacteriophages by Genome Length (and 'Breadth'). Microbiology Australia 32(2):90-91.
(The photo at the top of the article, btw, was taken of me on the beach, sadly not in Australia, and also sadly my beard is much grayer now…)
In any case, the point of this post is that I updated that figure here:
Hyman, P., Abedon, S. T. (2012). Smaller Fleas: Viruses of Microorganisms. Scientifica 2012:734023.
Petty perhaps, but I've always hated the font we were forced to use for the figures in that article, plus the labels for the y axis were removed by the publisher (and of course we missed the latter in the proofs).
Therefore, I've reprinted the figure below, with original legend, both with labels and original font. At some point I hope to update it!
Click on it to view a larger version of the figure.
I should also note that in Figure 1.6 of there is a comma missing between "Homologous" and "Illegitimate". Perhaps at some point I'll attempt to re-explain that figure, updated, as one of these postings…
Comparison of phage genome sizes as differentiated by family. Genome sizes are as provided by NCBI (follow the Viruses link from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome). Phage morphologies are provided also by NCBI but we defer to the International Committee for Virus Taxonomy given conflict between the two (http://www.ictvonline.org/). In addition, there are older sequences along with one newer sequence (phage G) that are not yet found on the above NCBI database page that we have included. These are for Enterobacteria phage SP (microvirus), Enterobacteria phage Fr (microvirus), Enterobacteria phage GA (microvirus), Bacillus phage G (myovirus), Bacillus phage PZA (podovirus), and Streptococcus phage SMP (siphovirus). Not included are genome sizes associated with unclassified phages. Total numbers of genomes included are as follows (if there are two numbers then the first is as found in the earlier version of this figure [19] and the second as found here): Leviviridae (10), Microviridae (17), Inoviridae (28→31), Corticoviridae (1), Plasmaviridae (1), Cystoviridae (5), Tectiviridae (4), Podoviridae (92→108), Siphoviridae (253→291), and Myoviridae (115→147). Purple refers to RNA genomes, red to ssDNA genomes, blue to dsDNA genomes as found in lipid-containing and tailless virions, and green, as indicated in the figure, are dsDNA in tailed and lipid-less virus particles.
