Multiple mechanisms drive phage infection efficiency in nearly identical hosts.

摘要: Phage-host interactions are critical to ecology, evolution, and biotechnology. Central those is infection efficiency, which remains poorly understood, particularly in nature. Here we apply genome-wide transcriptomics proteomics investigate efficiency nature's own experiment: two nearly identical (genetically physiologically) Bacteroidetes bacterial strains (host18 host38) that genetically intractable, but environmentally important, where phage varies. On host18, specialist phi18:3 infects efficiently, whereas generalist phi38:1 inefficiently. host38, only infects, efficiently. Overall, globally repressed host18's transcriptome proteome, expressed genes likely evaded host restriction/modification (R/M) defenses controlled its metabolism, synchronized transcription with translation. In contrast, failed repress did not evade R/M or express for metabolism control, synchronize transcripts proteins protein abundances were targeted by proteases. However, on translation, infected host38 Together these findings reveal multiple inefficiencies. While this contrasts the single mechanisms often revealed laboratory mutant studies, it better reflects phage-host interaction dynamics occur