Link to Pubmed [PMID] – 33634788
Link to DOI – 10.7554/eLife.60608e60608
Elife 2021 Feb; 10():
Bacteriophages play important roles in regulating the intestinal human microbiota composition, dynamics and homeostasis, and characterizing their bacterial hosts is needed to understand their impact. We applied a metagenomic Hi-C approach on 10 healthy human gut samples to unveil a large infection network encompassing more than 6,000 interactions bridging a metagenomic assembled genomes (MAGs) and a phage sequence, allowing to study in situ phage-host ratio. Whereas three-quarter of these sequences likely correspond to dormant prophages, 5% exhibit a much higher coverage than their associated MAG, representing potentially actively replicating phages. We detected 17 sequences of members of the crAss-like phage family, whose hosts diversity remained until recently relatively elusive. For each of them, a unique bacterial host was identified, all belonging to different genus of Bacteroidetes. Therefore, metaHiC deciphers infection network of microbial population with a high-specificity paving the way to dynamic analysis of mobile genetic elements in complex ecosystems.