“…Numerous crAss-like phages have been predicted to infect bacteria of the phylum Bacteroidetes (Dutilh et al, 2014;Yutin et al, 2021), and accordingly, several crAss-like phages have been isolated in cultures of Bacteroidetes hosts (Guerin et al, 2021;Hryckowian et al, 2020;Shkoporov et al, 2018), enriched in the presence of Bacteroidetes hosts (Fitzgerald et al, 2021), or linked to Bacteroidetes hosts using a chromosome conformation capture approach (Marbouty et al, 2021), although there is also evidence that some crAss-like phages may infect hosts from different phyla (Yutin et al, 2021). Apparently, crAss-like phages may coexist with their hosts relatively peacefully, because the same crAss-like phages were often recurrently detected in metagenomic samples of longitudinal study participants (Edwards et al, 2019;Shkoporov et al, 2019;Siranosian et al, 2020), and four crAss-like phages were shown to persist in the cultures of their hosts for a long time without a significant reduction in the host population (Guerin et al, 2021;Shkoporov et al, 2018Shkoporov et al, , 2021. Interestingly, hosts were shown to develop resistance to crAss-like phage infection via the phase variation mechanism: inversions in the bacterial genome loci responsible for cell surface coating biosynthesis were linked to altered cell surface architecture and a reduced ability of the bacteria to absorb phage (Shkoporov et al, 2021).…”