The Picovirinae are an established subfamily within the Podoviridae

Podoviridae

The Podoviridae are a family of bacteriophages. Unlike the other families of tailed viruses this family has short tails that are non contractile.There are at least 74 species in this family.-Virology:...

family of bacteriophage

Bacteriophage

A bacteriophage is any one of a number of viruses that infect bacteria. They do this by injecting genetic material, which they carry enclosed in an outer protein capsid...

 viruses.

Virology

Phages of this clade of virus typically have a relatively small dsDNA genome

Genome

In modern molecular biology and genetics, the genome is the entirety of an organism's hereditary information. It is encoded either in DNA or, for many types of virus, in RNA. The genome includes both the genes and the non-coding sequences of the DNA/RNA....

 (between 16-20 kbp) (hence the term pico-virinae). They also use a typical protein primed DNA polymerase

DNA polymerase

A DNA polymerase is an enzyme that helps catalyze in the polymerization of deoxyribonucleotides into a DNA strand. DNA polymerases are best known for their feedback role in DNA replication, in which the polymerase "reads" an intact DNA strand as a template and uses it to synthesize the new strand....

 for replication, a property shared with the Tectiviridae family.

Taxonomy

Currently, this subfamily contains two genera (the Phi29-like viruses and the AHJD-like viruses), as well as unassigned species Actinomyces phage Av-1 and Streptococcus phage Cp-1. This subdivision is based on genome organization and resemblance at the proteome level.