Abstract
As the most abundant biological entities, viruses are major players in marine ecosystems. However, our knowledge about virus-host interactions and viral ecology in the deep sea remains very limited. In this study, a novel bacteriophage (designated as phage BVE2) infecting Bacillus cereus group bacteria, was isolated from deep-sea sediments. Phage BVE2 caused host lysis within 1.5 h after infection. However, the presence of two integrase-encoding genes in the BVE2 genome suggested that BVE2 may also follow a temperate strategy. The genome of phage BVE2 is approximately 20 kb in length and is predicted to encode 28 proteins. Genomic and phylogenetic analysis suggested that BVE2 is a highly mosaic phage that has inherited genetic features from Wbeta-like viruses, B. cereus prophages, and its host, suggesting that frequent horizontal gene transfer events occurred during its evolution. This study will help to reveal the evolutionary history of Wbeta-like viruses and improve our understanding of viral diversity and virus–host interactions in the deep sea.
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Acknowledgements
This work was financially supported by the China Ocean Mineral Resources R&D Association (DY135-B-04), the Scientific Research Foundation of the Third Institute of Oceanography, MNR (2019013), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41976084, 31702372).
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The complete genome sequence of phage BVE2 was deposited in the GenBank database under the accession number MG584725.1.
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Detailed experimental methods are provided in Supplementary Materials.
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Chen, Y., Guo, X., Wu, J. et al. A novel deep-sea bacteriophage possesses features of Wbeta-like viruses and prophages. Arch Virol 165, 1219–1223 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00705-020-04579-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00705-020-04579-6