Poster abstracts
Poster number 12 submitted by Marissa Gittrich
Patterns of phage infection dynamics in Klebsiella sp. M5a1
Marissa R. Gittrich (Department of Microbiology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA.), Courtney M. Sanderson, Jonathan E. Leopold, Cara M. Noel (Department of Microbiology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA.), Erica Babusci (College of Food Agriculture and Environmental Science, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA.), Olivia R. Farinas (College of Public Health, Division of Environmental Health Sciences, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA.), Vivek K. Mutalik (Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA.), Matthew B. Sullivan (Department of Microbiology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA.)
Abstract:
Bacteriophages (phages) are broadly credited with being the main drivers of nutrient and energy cycles across Earth’s ecosystems. Although our identification of novel viruses has rapidly increased due to sequencing technology, our knowledge is still limited on the bacterial host factors required for phage infection except in a few model phage-host systems. A soil isolated, plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria Klebsiella sp. M5a1 and a genome-wide loss-of-function barcoded transposon mutant library (RB-TnSeq) was used to screen a phylogenetically diverse group of phages to identify the bacterial host factors used during phage infection. Phage-specific host factors were identified such as a transcriptional regulator sdiA and host factors that provided resistance across multiple phages such as glycosyltransferases. Overall, we found that many of the unique genes required for phage infection are dependent on phylogenetic relatedness. With this technique, we plan to study many diverse phages across several bacterial species to map the phage resistance landscape and develop predictive models for phage infection that can be applied to environmental and therapeutic systems.
Keywords: Phages, RB-TnSeq