2024/06/05 by Khalimat Murtazalieva, Andre Mu, Aleksandra Petrovskaya +2 · 8 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Environmental Science · Immunology and Microbiology · #Aquaculture disease management and microbiota #Bacteriophages and microbial interactions #Plant Virus Research Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.tim.2024.05.005
openalex publication_date 2024/06/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
The biological interplay between phages and bacteria has driven the evolution of phage anti-defence systems (ADSs), which evade bacterial defence mechanisms. These ADSs bind and inhibit host defence proteins, add covalent modifications and deactivate defence proteins, degrade or sequester signalling molecules utilised by host defence systems, synthesise and restore essential molecules depleted by bacterial defences, or add covalent modifications to phage molecules to avoid recognition. Overall, 145 phage ADSs have been characterised to date. These ADSs counteract 27 of the 152 different bacterial defence families, and we hypothesise that many more ADSs are yet to be discovered. We discuss high-throughput approaches (computational and experimental) which are indispensable for discovering new ADSs and the limitations of these approaches. A comprehensive characterisation of phage ADSs is critical for understanding phage-host interplay and developing clinical applications, such as treatment for multidrug-resistant bacterial infections.