Bacteriophages Roam the Wheat Phyllosphere

Abstract

The phyllosphere microbiome plays an important role in plant fitness. Recently, bacteriophages have been shown to play a role in shaping the bacterial community composition of the phyllosphere. However, no studies on the diversity and abundance of phyllosphere bacteriophage communities have been carried out until now. In this study, we extracted, sequenced, and characterized the dsDNA and ssDNA viral community from a phyllosphere for the first time. We sampled leaves from winter wheat (Triticum aestivum), where we identified a total of 876 virus operational taxonomic units (vOTUs), mostly predicted to be bacteriophages with a lytic lifestyle. Remarkably, 848 of these vOTUs corresponded to new viral species, and we estimated a minimum of 2.0 × 106 viral particles per leaf. These results suggest that the wheat phyllosphere harbors a large and active community of novel bacterial viruses. Phylloviruses have potential applications as biocontrol agents against phytopathogenic bacteria or as microbiome modulators to increase plant growth-promoting bacteria.

Isolation of Novel Xanthomonas Phages Infecting the Plant Pathogens X. translucens and X. campestris

“…This highlights that there is a vast number of uncharacterized phages out there that can potentially be harnessed for biocontrol. This is also in line with a recent phage metagenomic study of wheat phyllosphere where Xanthomonas and Pseudomonas were the most abundant bacterial genera in the plant phyllosphere and 96.8% of the generated viral taxonomic units did represent phages which have not been isolated so far [69].…”

“…In contrast, phage Mallos displayed the broadest host range and also infected the plant pathogenic bacterium Pseudomonas syringae DC3000, making it an omnylitic phage infecting species of two different alphaproteobacterial genera. This makes sense in the context that Xanthomonas and Pseudomonas are among the most abundant genera in the plant phyllosphere [ 69 ]. In addition, a recent study of two phages infecting Pseudomonas syringae pv.…”

Association Between Inflammatory Bowel Disease and Viral Infections

“…Bacteriophages, as bacterial predators, are essential in microbial species evolution [84]. The structural contents of bacteriophages are composed of nucleic acid and protein.…”

Detection of nucleotide modifications in bacteria and bacteriophages: Strengths and limitations of current technologies and software

“…If such hypermodifications (Weigele & Raleigh, 2016) are detrimental to Nanopore sensing to a degree where they prevent DNA from passing through pores (or lead to poor data quality), it may be practically impossible to sequence certain bacteriophage genomes on the Nanopore platform. This will be especially problematic when sequencing metagenomes and metaviromes (Alanin et al, 2021; Forero‐Junco et al, 2022) where viral contigs with certain modifications may never be detected. To put the latter into perspective, the default Phred score cutoff for quality filtering of Nanopore reads is 7 for “fast” basecalling models, which would filter away data from the genome of bacteriophages RB69, Vil, and PBS1.…”