Distantly related Alteromonas bacteriophages share tail fibers exhibiting properties of transient chaperone caps

Rafael Gonzalez-Serrano, Riccardo Rosselli, Juan J. Roda-Garcia, Ana-Belen Martin-Cuadrado, Francisco Rodriguez-Valera and Matthew Dunne ()
Additional contact information
Rafael Gonzalez-Serrano: Universidad Miguel Hernández
Riccardo Rosselli: LABAQUA S.A. Las Atalayas
Juan J. Roda-Garcia: Universidad Miguel Hernández
Ana-Belen Martin-Cuadrado: University of Alicante
Francisco Rodriguez-Valera: Universidad Miguel Hernández
Matthew Dunne: Institute of Food, Nutrition and Health

Nature Communications, 2023, vol. 14, issue 1, 1-14

Abstract: Abstract The host recognition modules encoding the injection machinery and receptor binding proteins (RBPs) of bacteriophages are predisposed to mutation and recombination to maintain infectivity towards co-evolving bacterial hosts. In this study, we reveal how Alteromonas mediterranea schitovirus A5 shares its host recognition module, including tail fiber and cognate chaperone, with phages from distantly related families including Alteromonas myovirus V22. While the V22 chaperone is essential for producing active tail fibers, here we demonstrate production of functional A5 tail fibers regardless of chaperone co-expression. AlphaFold-generated models of tail fiber and chaperone pairs from phages A5, V22, and other Alteromonas phages reveal how amino acid insertions within both A5-like proteins results in a knob domain duplication in the tail fiber and a chaperone β-hairpin “tentacle” extension. These structural modifications are linked to differences in chaperone dependency between the A5 and V22 tail fibers. Structural similarity between the chaperones and intramolecular chaperone domains of other phage RBPs suggests an additional function of these chaperones as transient fiber “caps”. Finally, our identification of homologous host recognition modules from morphologically distinct phages implies that horizontal gene transfer and recombination events between unrelated phages may be a more common process than previously thought among Caudoviricetes phages.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-42114-8 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:14:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-023-42114-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-42114-8

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().