Abstract
The activity of bacteriophages poses a major threat to bacterial survival. Upon infection, a temperate phage can either kill the host cell or be maintained as a prophage. In this state, the bacteria carrying the prophage is at risk of superinfection, where another phage injects its genetic material and competes for host cell resources. To avoid this, many phages have evolved mechanisms that alter the bacteria and make it resistant to phage superinfection. The mechanisms underlying these phentoypic conversions and the fitness consequences for the host are poorly understood, and systematic studies of superinfection exclusion mechanisms are lacking. In this study, we examined a wide range of Pseudomonas aeruginosa phages and found that they mediate superinfection exclusion through a variety of mechanisms, some of which affected the type IV pilus and O-antigen, and others that functioned inside the cell. The strongest resistance mechanism was a surface modification that we showed is cost-free for the bacterial host in a natural soil environment and in a Caenorhabditis. elegans infection model. This study represents the first systematic approach to address how a population of prophages influences phage resistance and bacterial behavior in P. aeruginosa.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by operating grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to KLM (MOP-136845) and ARD (XNE-86943). JB-D was supported by a CIHR Canada Graduate Scholarship Doctoral Award and an Ontario Graduate Scholarship. DSG is supported by NSERC. ERW was supported by NERC and Wellcome Trust. AB acknowledges NERC, AXA, BBSRC and the Royal Society for funding. We thank Andrew Spence, Kathy Shire, Steven Doyle and Battista Calvieri for advice and technical assistance. We also thank Derrick Fouts at the J Craig Venter Institute for phage sequencing (NIH U54 AI84844-01).
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Bondy-Denomy, J., Qian, J., Westra, E. et al. Prophages mediate defense against phage infection through diverse mechanisms. ISME J 10, 2854–2866 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2016.79
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2016.79
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