Planetary-scale marine community modeling predicts metabolic synergy and viral impacts

The oceans buffer against climate change via biogeochemical cycles underpinned by microbial metabolic networks. While planetary-scale surveys provide baseline microbiome data, inferring metabolic and biogeochemical impacts remains challenging. Here, we constructed a metabolic model for each TARA Ocean metagenome or metatranscriptome, quantified the importance of each metabolic reaction, and used this to assess planetary-scale heterotrophic prokaryotic metabolic phenotypes as a proxy for marine biogeochemistry. This revealed metabolism-inferred ecological zones that matched taxonomy- and function-inferred ones, connections between microbial metabolism and diversity, and predictions about long-sought virus ecological roles, including that virus-encoded metabolic genes target important reactions and identify viral shunt- or shuttle-enriched ocean regions. Together, this framework is agile and resolves planetary-scale community metabolic features to better incorporate microbes and viruses into future predictive ecosystem and climate models.