Pseudomonas Phage PaBG-A Jumbo Member of an Old Parasite Family.

Peter Evseev,Anna Gorshkova,Lidia Kurochkina,Nina Sykilinda,Rustam Ziganshin,Konstantin Miroshnikov,Valentin Drucker

doi:10.3390/v12070721

Abstract

Bacteriophage PaBG is a jumbo Myoviridae phage isolated from water of Lake Baikal. This phage has limited diffusion ability and thermal stability and infects a narrow range of Pseudomonas aeruginosa strains. Therefore, it is hardly suitable for phage therapy applications. However, the analysis of the genome of PaBG presents a number of insights into the evolutionary history of this phage and jumbo phages in general. We suggest that PaBG represents an ancient group distantly related to all known classified families of phages.

Highlights

Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria and are considered to be a dominant issue for theEarth’s biosphere, with an estimated total of 1031 phages on the planet [1,2]
The jumbo bacteriophage PaBG was isolated from a water sample from Lake Baikal in 2010 [5]
Predicted protein sequences using a custom database constructed with 375 published phage-like and plasmid-like sequences. These sequences were acquired from metagenomic datasets from human fecal and oral samples, fecal samples from other animals, freshwater lakes and rivers, marine ecosystems, sediments, hot springs, soils, deep subsurface habitats and the built environment [50], and we found homologous sequences (BitScore > 50) for 111 PaBG predicted proteins

Summary

Introduction

Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria and are considered to be a dominant issue for theEarth’s biosphere, with an estimated total of 1031 phages on the planet [1,2]. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria and are considered to be a dominant issue for the. DNA genomes above 200 kb are classified as giant or jumbo phages [3]. Such phages have been isolated from diverse environments, including water, soil, marine sediments, plant tissues, silkworms, compost, animal feces and other habitats [3]. The GenBank PHG database contains about 12,000 complete and partial phage genomes as of the end of February, 2020. A small fraction of these genomes (208) can be attributed to jumbo phages. About half of them (103 genomes) are not yet assigned to a specific genus

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Conclusion