A widespread family of polymorphic toxins encoded by temperate phages.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Polymorphic toxins (PTs) are multi-domain bacterial exotoxins belonging to distinct families that share common features in terms of domain organization. PTs are found in all major bacterial clades, including many toxic effectors of type V and type VI secretion systems. PTs modulate the dynamics of microbial communities by killing or inhibiting the growth of bacterial competitors lacking protective immunity proteins.

Results

In this work, we identified a novel widespread family of PTs, named MuF toxins, which were exclusively encoded within temperate phages and their prophages. By analyzing the predicted proteomes of 1845 bacteriophages and 2464 bacterial genomes, we found that MuF-containing proteins were frequently part of the DNA packaging module of tailed phage

SUBMITTER: Jamet A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5576092 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature