Theridion simile, a spider native to Washington, found on Whidbey Island, Washington. This type of spider was part of a Fred Hutch and UW study that identified new spider viruses.

So he called up Seattle’s “spider guy”: Rod Crawford, the UW Burke Museum’s longtime arachnologist and curator of a huge collection of local, preserved spiders.

Did Crawford have any extra spiders sitting around that Greninger could throw in his sequencer? Crawford did. (That was the first time in his 46 years running the Burke’s spider collection that any of his specimens had been used in a virology study, Crawford said.)

Several tubes of spiders went into the virology lab. Six new spider viruses — from six different Washington state spider species — came out.

The idea that we’re all surrounded by thousands or even millions of viruses, all the time, could be mildly terrifying. But to Greninger, it’s inspiring. To him, the coolest part about the millions or billions of viruses that inhabit the world is that they’re like a carbon copy of the evolution of life itself, only much simpler. Viruses have been around since life began, and they’ve been evolving along with their hosts ever since. When the first single-celled creature eventually evolved into two different single-celled creatures, viruses were tucked away inside, quietly changing their own genes to hitch an evolutionary ride.

A fishy mystery

When he was describing his animal virus work, Greninger ticked off his local collaborators on his fingers. There was Crawford, the spider guy. There is also a “moth guy” — David Droppers, a volunteer with the Washington Butterfly Association, who would meet Greninger in the parking lot of the UW hospital with envelopes full of local moths (six new viruses found there too). Most recently, Greninger connected with Dr. James Winton, the salmon guy.

Unlike Crawford and Droppers, Winton is actually also an expert in animal viruses — in this case, fish viruses. He is recently retired from the U.S. Geological Survey and spent his career studying viruses and other pathogens in both wild and farm-raised fish. As part of his job, he helps identify viruses from wild salmon in Washington state when they return from the ocean to freshwater to spawn. This is the point in the fish’s life cycle when they are most vulnerable to infection. Because they die after spawning, the fish put all their body’s energy toward egg production, sapping the reserves used for immune defense.

Local researchers sample some of these fish to survey for any possible emerging epidemics that might affect the local wild populations. Two years ago, Winton and his colleagues had been sent a salmon virus that they couldn’t identify with the techniques they had available at the time. So the test tubes containing that mysterious virus were left sitting in their lab freezer ever since. Through a colleague, Greninger heard about the unidentified virus.

“And Alex had never met an unknown virus he didn’t like,” Winton said.

Greninger, Makhsous and their colleagues sequenced it — “literally like shooting fish viruses in a barrel,” Greninger quipped — and it turned out to be a type of aquareovirus, a virus of a class that Winton had actually discovered himself.

These viruses are typically harmless, although some types of aquareovirus found in China can be deadly to the fish, Winton said. They don’t spread to humans.

The team published a study about the new salmon virus in the Virology Journal in September. It’s more a story of collaboration and new techniques than anything that will affect local conservation efforts, Winton said. Recently, he and other USGS researchers have begun working with the Hutch’s Shared Resources teams to identify and characterize other new fish viruses.

Filling in the viral puzzle

In general, the researchers aren’t in it for the glory of discovering new viruses — of the 50 new viruses they’ve uncovered in the past two years, most haven’t even been published in scientific journals. Their sequences are immediately put in a publicly available database, though, for other scientists to use.

But the work, which Greninger has mostly been conducting on nights and weekends or whenever he can squeeze it in around his busy schedule in the hospital as a laboratory medicine resident, isn’t meant to be headline-grabbing. Rather, it’s about information-gathering.