Isolation, characterization, and genome analysis of novel bacteriophage – Stenotrophomonas phageCM1

Abstract

A common environmental bacteria called Stenotrophomonas maltophilia has become an organism responsible for significant nosocomial infection, mortality in immunocompromised patients, and significantly increasing morbidity and is challenging to treat due to the antibiotic resistance activity of the organism. and bacteriophage therapy is one of the promising treatments against the organism. In this research, we isolated, identified, and characterized Stenotrophomonas phage CM1 against S. maltophilia. Stenotrophomonas phage CM1 head was measured to have a diameter of around 224.25 nm and a tail length of about 159 nm. The phage was found to have noticeable elongated tail spikes around 125 nm in length, the Myoviridae family of viruses, which is categorized under the order Caudovirales. The ideal pH for growth was around 7, demonstrated good thermal stability when incubated at 37–60 °C for 30 min or 60 min, and phage infectivity decreased marginally after 30 min of incubation at 1–5% chloroform concentration. Phage was 3,19,518 base pairs long and had an averaged G + C composition of 43.9 %; 559 open-reading frames (ORFs) were found in the bacteriophage genome, in which 508 of them are hypothetical proteins, 22 of them are other known proteins, 29 of them are tRNAs, and one of them is restriction enzyme. A phylogenetic tree was reconstructed, demonstrating that CM1 shares a close evolutionary relationship with other Stenotrophomonas phages.