Global Composition of the Bacteriophage Community in Honey Bees

Abstract

Viruses that infect bacteria (bacteriophages) are abundant in the microbial communities that live on and in plants and animals. However, our knowledge of the structure, dynamics, and function of these viral communities lags far behind our knowledge of their bacterial hosts.

Metagenomic analysis of the honey bee queen microbiome reveals low bacterial diversity and Caudoviricetes phages

“…With our metagenomic approach, we were able to show for the first time that Caudoviricetes, a class of tailed bacteriophages, are part of the queen gut microbial community (Table S5). Previous studies have shown that Caudoviricetes are the main phages in the microbiome of honey bee workers (18, 44, 45), but the lack of similarity in the gut bacterial community of these two female castes had left open the question about the phages present in the queen microbiome. In the worker gut the main phage hosts are the core bacteria Bifidobacterium , Gilliamella and Lactobacillus, and the non-core Bartonella (18, 44, 45).…”

“…Previous studies have shown that Caudoviricetes are the main phages in the microbiome of honey bee workers (18, 44, 45), but the lack of similarity in the gut bacterial community of these two female castes had left open the question about the phages present in the queen microbiome. In the worker gut the main phage hosts are the core bacteria Bifidobacterium , Gilliamella and Lactobacillus, and the non-core Bartonella (18, 44, 45). Among these hosts, Lactobacillus is the only genus that is also found in the queen microbiome and, interestingly, we show here it is the queen gut bacterium hosting the majority of phages (Fig.…”

“…Dysbiosis in this system is strongly correlated with poorer worker fitness and is characterized by shifts in the load of core microbes and the spread of opportunistic bacteria (16). More recently, fungi and bacteriophages community characterization have also been included in studies of the bee microbiome (17, 18). The role that phages play in molding the microbiome and impacting host health has been shown in unrelated model systems (19, 20, 21, 22), but in honey bees their diversity and potential effects are under studied.…”

Engineering strategies for insect viruses and microbes for dsRNA production and delivery to insects for targeted gene silencing

“…In a similar way, Caudovirales phage species are the most studied group infecting gut symbiotic bacteria in insects (Xu et al 2016;Pramono et al 2017;Vallino et al 2021;Keller et al 2021;Zhang et al 2022). The recent application of metagenomics has started to unravel the phage gut virome of some insect species, for instance, in honey bees most gut viruses could not be classified under existing viral families, whereas the ones that could were mostly within the Myoviridae and Siphoviridae families under Caudovirales (Bonilla-Rosso et al 2020;Busby et al 2022). Future insect gut metagenomics studies may expand the knowledge of phage species infecting key symbiotic bacteria for insect survival, which might be explored to develop vectors following the 'Trojan horse' approach for pest control.…”

The power of unbiased phenotypic screens – cellulose as a first receptor for the Schitoviridae phage S6 of Erwinia amylovora

“…Phages, as single entities, as cocktails, genetically engineered or as purified components, also play a role as alternatives or supplements to antimicrobial treatment to restrict infection by human and plant pathogens since almost a century (Parfitt, 2005; Lin et al ., 2017; Farooq et al ., 2022). Established phages are characterized in more detail and novel phages with unique characteristics are urgently sought with large uncultivated phage populations as a pool (Dion et al ., 2020; Kortright et al ., 2020; Andrade‐Martinez et al ., 2022; Busby et al ., 2022).…”