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Large bacteriophages that dwarf the smallest bacteria also carry bacterial genes, including CRISPR and ribosomal proteins, blurring the line between living microbes and viral machines. These phages — short for bacteriophages, so-called because they “eat” bacteria — are of a size and complexity considered typical of life, carry numerous genes normally found in bacteria and use these genes against their bacterial hosts. University of California, Berkeley, researchers and their collaborators found these huge phages by scouring a large database of DNA that they generated from nearly 30 different Earth environments, ranging from the guts of premature infants and pregnant women to a Tibetan hot spring, a South African bioreactor, hospital rooms, oceans, lakes and deep underground. Altogether they identified 351 different huge phages, all with genomes four or more times larger than the average genomes of viruses that prey on single-celled bacteria.
Among these is the largest bacteriophage discovered to date: Its genome, 735,000 base-pairs long, is nearly 15 times larger than the average phage. This largest known phage genome is much larger than the genomes of many bacteria. “We are exploring Earth’s microbiomes, and sometimes unexpected things turn up. These viruses of bacteria are a part of biology, of replicating entities, that we know very little about,” said Jill Banfield, a UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science and of environmental science, policy and management, and senior author of a paper about the findings appearing Feb 12 in the journal Nature. “These huge phages bridge the gap between non-living bacteriophages, on the one hand, and bacteria and Archaea. There definitely seem to be successful strategies of existence that are hybrids between what we think of as traditional viruses and traditional living organisms.”
Ironically, within the DNA that these huge phages lug around are parts of the CRISPR system that bacteria use to fight viruses. It’s likely that once these phages inject their DNA into bacteria, the viral CRISPR system augments the CRISPR system of the host bacteria, probably mostly to target other viruses. “It is fascinating how these phages have repurposed this system we thought of as bacterial or archaeal to use for their own benefit against their competition, to fuel warfare between these viruses,” said UC Berkeley graduate student Basem Al-Shayeb. Al-Shayeb and research associate Rohan Sachdeva are co-first authors of the Nature paper....
Published in Nature (Feb. 12, 2020):
