The effect of a temperature-sensitive prophage on the evolution of virulence in an opportunistic bacterial pathogen.

ABSTRACT: Viruses are key actors of ecosystems and have major impacts on global biogeochemical cycles. Prophages deserve particular attention as they are ubiquitous in bacterial genomes and can enter a lytic cycle when triggered by environmental conditions. We explored how temperature affects the interactions between prophages and other biological levels using an opportunistic pathogen, the bacterium Serratia marcescens, which harbours several prophages and that had undergone an evolution experiment under several temperature regimes. We found that the release of one of the prophages was temperature-sensitive and malleable to evolutionary changes. We further discovered that the virulence of the bacterium in an insect model also evolved and was positively correlated with phage release rates. We determ

SUBMITTER: Bruneaux M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9826266 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature