Abstract
The bacterial and archaeal cell surface is decorated with filamentous surface structures that are used for different functions, such as motility, DNA exchange and biofilm formation. Viruses hijack these structures and use them to ride to the cell surface for successful entry. In this review, we describe currently known mechanisms for viral attachment, translocation, and entry via filamentous surface structures. We describe the different mechanisms used to exploit various surface structures bacterial and archaeal viruses. This overview highlights the importance of filamentous structures at the cell surface for entry of prokaryotic viruses.
Highlights
Microbial viruses are extremely abundant and diverse
Spindle shaped viruses likely allow for DNA ejection, which is affected by their capability of transitioning from lemon-shaped capsids to tubular structures, where the DNA is under higher pressure [8,9,10,11]
We focus on bacterial viruses for which several such mechanisms have been explored in detail [15,16], and on archaeal viruses, which were only recently shown to interact with filamentous cell structures
Summary
Microbial viruses are extremely abundant and diverse. They are estimated to outnumber their hosts with a factor 10 in some environments and are found in a huge range of habitats [1]. Use of filamentous surface structures is much rarer among viruses infecting Gram-positive bacteria than among those infecting Gram-negatives, with one recorded instance of such a virus (Bacillus virus PBS1) using the flagellum as a recognition site [14]. Instead, these viruses most frequently recognize sugar moieties of cell wall teichoic acids [13]. Most families of bacterial viruses contain members that use filamentous surface structures as initial binding sites. We discuss interesting cases from bacterial and archaeal viruses, of which the underlying molecular mechanisms have been studied
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