Living Systems Institute, University of Exeter, Stocker Road, Exeter, EX4 4QD, UK.
Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, EX4 4QD, UK.
Nat Commun. 2023 May 11;14(1):2724. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-37915-w.
Phages are viruses that infect bacteria and dominate every ecosystem on our planet. As well as impacting microbial ecology, physiology and evolution, phages are exploited as tools in molecular biology and biotechnology. This is particularly true for the Ff (f1, fd or M13) phages, which represent a widely distributed group of filamentous viruses. Over nearly five decades, Ffs have seen an extraordinary range of applications, yet the complete structure of the phage capsid and consequently the mechanisms of infection and assembly remain largely mysterious. In this work, we use cryo-electron microscopy and a highly efficient system for production of short Ff-derived nanorods to determine a structure of a filamentous virus including the tips. We show that structure combined with mutagenesis can identify phage domains that are important in bacterial attack and for release of new progeny, allowing new models to be proposed for the phage lifecycle.
噬菌体是感染细菌的病毒，它们主宰着我们星球上的每一个生态系统。除了影响微生物的生态学、生理学和进化外，噬菌体还被用作分子生物学和生物技术的工具。这在 Ff（f1、fd 或 M13）噬菌体中尤为明显，它们代表了广泛分布的丝状病毒群。在近五十年的时间里，Ff 已经看到了非常广泛的应用，然而，噬菌体衣壳的完整结构以及感染和组装的机制在很大程度上仍然是神秘的。在这项工作中，我们使用低温电子显微镜和一种高效的生产短 Ff 衍生纳米棒的系统来确定一种丝状病毒的结构，包括病毒的尖端。我们表明，结构结合突变分析可以确定噬菌体在细菌攻击和释放新子代中重要的结构域，从而为噬菌体生命周期提出新的模型。
