Phages with a broad host range are common across ecosystems | NYGazet

Phages are diverse and abundant within microbial communities, where they play major roles in their evolution and adaptation. Phage replication, and multiplication, is generally thought to be restricted within a single or narrow host range. Here we use published and newly generated proximity-ligation-based metagenomic Hi-C (metaHiC) data from various environments to explore virus–host interactions. We reconstructed 4,975 microbial and 6,572 phage genomes of medium quality or higher. MetaHiC yielded a contact network between genomes and enabled assignment of approximately half of phage genomes to their hosts, revealing that a substantial proportion of these phages interact with multiple species in environments as diverse as the oceanic water column or the human gut. This observation challenges the traditional view of a narrow host spectrum of phages by unveiling that multihost associations are common across ecosystems, with implications for how they might impact ecology and evolution and phage therapy approaches. Proximity-ligation-based sequencing from 111 samples and 5 environments reveals that a substantial proportion of phages infect multiple species.

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