The Bacillus phage SPβ and its relatives: a temperate phage model system reveals new strains, species, prophage integration loci, conserved proteins and lysogeny management components

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  • Katharina Kohm
  • Valentina A. Floccari
  • Lutz, Veronika Theresa
  • Birthe Nordmann
  • Carolin Mittelstädt
  • Anja Poehlein
  • Anna Dragoš
  • Fabian M. Commichau
  • Robert Hertel

The Bacillus phage SPβ has been known for about 50 years, but only a few strains are available. We isolated four new wild-type strains of the SPbeta species. Phage vB_BsuS-Goe14 introduces its prophage into the spoVK locus, previously not observed to be used by SPβ-like phages. Sequence data revealed the genome replication strategy and the genome packaging mode of SPβ-like phages. We extracted 55 SPβ-like prophages from public Bacillus genomes, thereby discovering three more integration loci and one additional type of integrase. The identified prophages resemble four new species clusters and three species orphans in the genus Spbetavirus. The determined core proteome of all SPβ-like prophages consists of 38 proteins. The integration cassette proved to be not conserved, even though, present in all strains. It consists of distinct integrases. Analysis of SPβ transcriptomes revealed three conserved genes, yopQ, yopR, and yokI, to be transcribed from a dormant prophage. While yopQ and yokI could be deleted from the prophage without activating the prophage, damaging of yopR led to a clear-plaque phenotype. Under the applied laboratory conditions, the yokI mutant showed an elevated virion release implying the YokI protein being a component of the arbitrium system.

Original languageEnglish
JournalEnvironmental Microbiology
Volume24
Issue number4
Pages (from-to)2098-2118
Number of pages21
ISSN1462-2912
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022

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© 2022 The Authors. Environmental Microbiology published by Society for Applied Microbiology and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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