0000000000281813
AUTHOR
Rafael Sanjuan
Inference of the Life Cycle of Environmental Phages from Genomic Signature Distances to Their Hosts
The environmental impact of uncultured phages is shaped by their preferred life cycle (lytic or lysogenic). However, our ability to predict it is very limited. We aimed to discriminate between lytic and lysogenic phages by comparing the similarity of their genomic signatures to those of their hosts, reflecting their co-evolution. We tested two approaches: (1) similarities of tetramer relative frequencies, (2) alignment-free comparisons based on exact k = 14 oligonucleotide matches. First, we explored 5126 reference bacterial host strains and 284 associated phages and found an approximate threshold for distinguishing lysogenic and lytic phages using both oligonucleotide-based methods. The an…
Social Bacteriophages
This article belongs to the Section Medical Microbiology.
Cooperative Virus-Virus Interactions: An Evolutionary Perspective
Despite extensive evidence of virus-virus interactions, not much is known about their biological significance. Importantly, virus-virus interactions could have evolved as a form of cooperation or simply be a by-product of other processes. Here, we review and discuss different types of virus-virus interactions from the point of view of social evolution, which provides a well-established framework for interpreting the fitness costs and benefits of such traits. We also classify interactions according to their mechanisms of action and speculate on their evolutionary implications. As in any other biological system, the evolutionary stability of viral cooperation critically requires cheaters to b…
Spatially segregated transmission of Co-occluded baculoviruses limits virus–virus interactions mediated by cellular coinfection during primary infection
This article belongs to the Section General Virology.