2024/04/22 by Barrero-Canosa, Jimena, Wang, Luyao, Oyugi, Angelah +5
#500 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik::570 Biowissenschaften #Biologie #Biologie::570 Biowissenschaften #Dhillonvirus #E. coli #LC-MS/MS #bacteriophage #coliphage #mass spectrometry #proteomics #stress response
paper · doi:10.14279/depositonce-20255
Phages influence microbial communities, can be applied in phage therapy, or may serve as bioindicators, e.g., in (waste)water management. We here characterized the Escherichia phage vBEcoS-EE09 isolated from an urban wastewater treatment plant effluent. Phage vBEcoS-EE09 belongs to the genus Dhillonvirus, class Caudoviricetes. It has an icosahedral capsid with a long non-contractile tail and a dsDNA genome with an approximate size of 44 kb and a 54.6% GC content. Phage vBEcoS-EE09 infected 12 out of the 17 E. coli strains tested. We identified 16 structural phage proteins, including the major capsid protein, in cell-free lysates by protein mass spectrometry. Comparative proteomics of protein extracts of infected E. coli cells revealed that proteins involved in amino acid and protein metabolism were more abundant in infected compared to non-infected cells. Among the proteins involved in the stress response, 74% were less abundant in the infected cultures compared to the non-infected controls, with six proteins showing significant less abundance. Repressing the expression of these proteins may be a phage strategy to evade host defense mechanisms. Our results contribute to diversifying phage collections, identifying structural proteins to enable better reliability in annotating taxonomically related phage genomes, and understanding phage–host interactions at the protein level.