Phages with a broad host range are common across ecosystems
Phages are diverse and abundant within microbial communities, where they play major roles in their evolution and adaptation. Phage replication – and multiplication – is generally thought to be restricted within a single or narrow host range. We use and reprocess published and newly generated proximity ligation-based metagenomic Hi-C (metaHiC) data from various environments to explore virus-host interactions at large scale. We reconstructed 4,975 microbial and 6,572 phage genomes of medium quality or higher. MetaHiC yielded a contact network between genomes and enabled assignment of approximately half of phage genomes to their hosts, revealing that a substantial proportion of these phages interact with multiple species and this, in environments as diverse as oceanic water column or the human gut. This observation challenges the traditional view of a narrow host spectrum of phages by unveiling that multi-host associations are common across ecosystems, with implications how they might impact ecology and evolution and phage therapy approaches.
Short bio
Martial Marbouty is a CNRS researcher at the Institut Pasteur in the team Sptial Regulation of Genomes. He pioneered the use of DNA contacts (3C based methods) to solve limitations on genome annotation, genome assembly and metagenome analysis, notably MGEs. He holds strong expertises in phage biology, assembly, genome annotation, sequencing technology and metagenomics analysis.
Laboratory of the speaker
Spatial regulation Of Genomes (Pasteur Institute, Paris)
Invited by
Arnaud Chastanet
