Abstract
As a potential alternative to antibiotics, phages can be used to treat multi-drug resistant bacteria. As such, the biological characteristics of phages should be investigated to utilize them as effective antimicrobial agents. In this study, phage PaoP5, a lytic virus that infects Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1, was isolated and genomically characterized. PaoP5 comprises an icosahedral head with an apex diameter of 69 nm and a contractile tail with a length of 120 nm. The PaoP5 genome is a linear dsDNA molecule containing 93,464 base pairs (bp) with 49.51% G + C content of 11 tRNA genes and a 1,200 bp terminal redundancy. A total of 176 protein-coding genes were predicted in the PaoP5 genome. Nine PaoP5 structural proteins were identified. Three hypothetical proteins were determined as structural. Comparative genomic analyses revealed that seven new Pseudomonas phages, namely, PaoP5, K8, C11, vB_PaeM_C2-10_Ab02, vB_PaeM_C2-10_Ab08, vB_PaeM_C2-10_Ab10, and vB_PaeM_C2-10_Ab15, were similar to PAK_P1-like viruses. Phylogenetic and pan-genome analyses suggested that the new phages should be assigned to PAK_P1-like viruses, which possess approximately 100 core genes and 150 accessory genes. This work presents a detailed and comparative analysis of PaoP5 to enhance our understanding of phage biology.
Highlights
As a Gram-negative opportunistic pathogen, Pseudomonas aeruginosa is the leading cause of local and systemic nosocomial infections; in some cases, its infection is life threatening[5]
Phage PaoP5 was isolated from hospital sewage using P. aeruginosa PAO1 as host bacterium
Transmission electron microscopy analysis indicated that the head structure of PaoP5 is an icosahedron with an apex diameter of approximately 69 nm (Fig. 1)
Summary
Members Assigned to PAK_P1-like received:06April2016 accepted: 07 September 2016. Mengyu Shen, Shuai Le, Xiaolin Jin, Gang Li, Yinling Tan, Ming Li, Xia Zhao, Wei Shen, Yuhui Yang, Jing Wang, Hongbin Zhu, Shu Li, Xiancai Rao, Fuquan Hu & Shuguang Lu. Comparative genomic analyses revealed that seven new Pseudomonas phages, namely, PaoP5, K8, C11, vB_PaeM_C2-10_Ab02, vB_PaeM_C2-10_Ab08, vB_PaeM_C2-10_Ab10, and vB_PaeM_C2-10_Ab15, were similar to PAK_P1-like viruses. In February 2016, the number of completely sequenced phages reached 2,012, including 1,935 infecting bacteria and 77 infecting archaea, as revealed by the data from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (Bethesda, MA, USA). This number is lower than that of completely sequenced bacteria, which reached 5,020 in February 2016, the genome size of phages is less than that of bacteria. With the rapid development of genome sequencing, numerous novel P. aeruginosa phages have been identified Most of these phages have remained unclassified. Novel P. aeruginosa phages should be characterized and classified to facilitate the understanding of the interactions between P. aeruginosa and its phages and to help develop new approaches that combat this versatile pathogen
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