Abstract
Using different Sinorhizobium meliloti strains as hosts, we isolated eight new virulent phages from the rhizosphere of the coastal legume Medicago marina. Half of the isolated phages showed a very narrow host range while the other half exhibited a wider host range within the strains tested. Electron microscopy studies showed that phages M_ort18, M_sf1.2, and M_sf3.33 belonged to the Myoviridae family with feature long, contractile tails and icosaedral head. Phages I_sf3.21 and I_sf3.10T appeared to have filamentous shape and produced turbid plaques, which is a characteristic of phages from the Inoviridae family. Phage P_ort11 is a member of the Podoviridae, with an icosahedral head and a short tail and was selected for further characterization and genome sequencing. P_ort11 contained linear, double-stranded DNA with a length of 75239 bp and 103 putative open reading frames. BLASTP analysis revealed strong similarities to Escherichia phage N4 and other N4-like phages. This is the first report of filamentous and N4-like phages that infect S. meliloti.
Highlights
Sinorhizobium (Ensifer) meliloti is a soil bacterium able to induce the formation of root nodules on Medicago, Melilotus and Trigonella legumes, where these bacteria fix atmospheric nitrogen (Béna et al, 2005; Willems, 2006; Gibson et al, 2008; Zhang et al, 2012)
The most abundant and genetically diverse entities on Earth are viruses of bacteria, with the global count estimated to be greater than 1031 (Hendrix, 2002; Clokie et al, 2011). It is well-known that bacterial species can be infected by several different phages, Diversity of Sinorhizobium meliloti Bacteriophages which can serve as agents of gene mobilization across bacterial population (Canchaya et al, 2003)
In this work we identified eight novel bacteriophages using different S. meliloti strains as trapping host and the rhizosphere harbors a broad diversity of phages not yet shown before
Summary
Sinorhizobium (Ensifer) meliloti is a soil bacterium able to induce the formation of root nodules on Medicago, Melilotus and Trigonella legumes, where these bacteria fix atmospheric nitrogen (Béna et al, 2005; Willems, 2006; Gibson et al, 2008; Zhang et al, 2012). The most abundant and genetically diverse entities on Earth are viruses of bacteria (bacteriophages), with the global count estimated to be greater than 1031 (Hendrix, 2002; Clokie et al, 2011). It is well-known that bacterial species can be infected by several different phages, Diversity of Sinorhizobium meliloti Bacteriophages which can serve as agents of gene mobilization across bacterial population (Canchaya et al, 2003). The reports of the genome sequence from a large number of bacteria have shown that many of them harbor prophages as well as genes from phages (Casjens, 2003; Decewicz et al, 2017). New genome sequences and structural analysis have provided a broader and deeper knowledge about the diversity of S. meliloti phages (Ganyu et al, 2005; Schulmeister et al, 2009; Deak et al, 2010; Brewer et al, 2014; Dziewit et al, 2014; Stroupe et al, 2014; Crockett et al, 2015; Hodson et al, 2015; Johnson et al, 2015, 2017; Schouten et al, 2015; Decewicz et al, 2017)
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