Department of Biological and Environmental Science, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland.
Molecular and Integrative Biosciences Research Programme, Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
Mol Ecol. 2022 Oct;31(20):5402-5418. doi: 10.1111/mec.16638. Epub 2022 Sep 17.
Viruses are key actors of ecosystems and have major impacts on global biogeochemical cycles. Prophages deserve particular attention as they are ubiquitous in bacterial genomes and can enter a lytic cycle when triggered by environmental conditions. We explored how temperature affects the interactions between prophages and other biological levels using an opportunistic pathogen, the bacterium Serratia marcescens, which harbours several prophages and that had undergone an evolution experiment under several temperature regimes. We found that the release of one of the prophages was temperature-sensitive and malleable to evolutionary changes. We further discovered that the virulence of the bacterium in an insect model also evolved and was positively correlated with phage release rates. We determined through analysis of genetic and epigenetic data that changes in the bacterial outer cell wall structure possibly explain this phenomenon. We hypothezise that the temperature-dependent phage release rate acted as a selection pressure on S. marcescens and that it resulted in modified bacterial virulence in the insect host. Our study system illustrates how viruses can mediate the influence of abiotic environmental changes to other biological levels and thus be involved in ecosystem feedback loops.
病毒是生态系统的关键参与者,对全球生物地球化学循环有重大影响。原噬菌体尤其值得关注,因为它们在细菌基因组中普遍存在,并且当受到环境条件的触发时可以进入裂解周期。我们使用一种机会性病原体——粘质沙雷氏菌来探索温度如何影响原噬菌体与其他生物层次之间的相互作用,该细菌携带有多个原噬菌体,并在几个温度条件下经历了进化实验。我们发现,其中一个原噬菌体的释放对温度敏感且易于进化变化。我们进一步发现,细菌在昆虫模型中的毒力也发生了进化,并与噬菌体释放率呈正相关。通过对遗传和表观遗传数据的分析,我们确定了细菌外细胞壁结构的变化可能解释了这一现象。我们假设,温度依赖性噬菌体释放率对 S. marcescens 起到了选择压力的作用,导致其在昆虫宿主中的细菌毒力发生改变。我们的研究系统说明了病毒如何介导非生物环境变化对其他生物层次的影响,从而参与生态系统反馈循环。