Earth and Biological Sciences Directorate, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA.
Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR, USA.
Nat Commun. 2023 Nov 23;14(1):7666. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-42967-z.
Bacteriophages are abundant in soils. However, the majority are uncharacterized, and their hosts are unknown. Here, we apply high-throughput chromosome conformation capture (Hi-C) to directly capture phage-host relationships. Some hosts have high centralities in bacterial community co-occurrence networks, suggesting phage infections have an important impact on the soil bacterial community interactions. We observe increased average viral copies per host (VPH) and decreased viral transcriptional activity following a two-week soil-drying incubation, indicating an increase in lysogenic infections. Soil drying also alters the observed phage host range. A significant negative correlation between VPH and host abundance prior to drying indicates more lytic infections result in more host death and inversely influence host abundance. This study provides empirical evidence of phage-mediated bacterial population dynamics in soil by directly capturing specific phage-host interactions.
噬菌体在土壤中大量存在。然而，大多数噬菌体尚未被描述，其宿主也不为人知。在这里，我们应用高通量染色体构象捕获（Hi-C）技术直接捕获噬菌体-宿主关系。一些宿主在细菌群落共现网络中具有较高的中心性，这表明噬菌体感染对土壤细菌群落相互作用有重要影响。我们观察到，在两周的土壤干燥孵育后，每个宿主的平均病毒拷贝数（VPH）增加，病毒转录活性降低，这表明溶原性感染增加。土壤干燥还改变了观察到的噬菌体宿主范围。干燥前 VPH 与宿主丰度之间存在显著的负相关关系，表明更多的裂解性感染导致更多的宿主死亡，并反过来影响宿主丰度。本研究通过直接捕获特定的噬菌体-宿主相互作用，为土壤中噬菌体介导的细菌种群动态提供了经验证据。
