TY - JOUR
T1 - Cyanophages infecting the oceanic cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus
AU - Sullivan, Matthew B.
AU - Waterbury, John B.
AU - Chisholm, Sallie W.
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements This research was funded by the Biological and Environmental Research Program of the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The Joint Genome Institute managed the overall sequencing effort. Genome finishing was carried out under the auspices of the US Department of Energy by the University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Computational annotation was carried out at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, managed by UT-BATTELLE for the US Department of Energy. Additional support was provided by the DOE, NSF and the Seaver Foundation to S.W.C., the Israel–US Binational Science Foundation to A.F.P. and S.W.C., and FP5-Margenes to W.R.H. and A.F.P. We thank the Synechococcus WH8102 annotators (B. Palenik, B. Brahamsha, J. McCarren, E. Allen, F. Partensky, A. Dufresne and I. Paulsen) for their help with curating the Prochlorococcus genomes and E. V. Armbrust and L. Moore for critical reading of the manuscript.
Funding Information:
Acknowledgements We thank E. Rizzo, S. Tognin, A. Donadini, A. M. Barbieri and L. Castelli for technical advice; for providing salt-washed purified ribosomal subunits, we thank T. Pestova. For sharing reagents, information and critical advice, we thank A. Bachi, T.-A. Sato, F. Loreni, F. Amaldi, P. Linder, J. Traugh, A. Johnson, A. Hinnebusch, A. Burlando, L. Spremulli, E. Villa, J. Verdiere, D. Ron, T. Dever, C. Groft and M. Foiani. This work was supported by AIRC, MURST (P.C.M., S.B.). This study was carried out under the framework of the Italian MUIR Center of Excellence in Physiopathology of Cell Differentiation.
Funding Information:
Acknowledgements We thank the respective Captain and crew of the R/V Oceanus and the R/V Endeavor for their help on research cruises, which were made possible by an NSF grant to chief scientists J. Moffett and B. Binder, respectively. This work was funded in part by Grants from the Seaver Foundation, NSF and DOE to S.W.C., and an NIH Genome Training Grant, an MIT Research Fellowship and a WHOI Research Fellowship to M.B.S. We thank A. F. Post for Red Sea samples, G. Tan for technical assistance, J. A. King and P. Weigele for TEM suggestions, S. Casjens and F. Rohwer for help with prophage analysis, and W. H. Wilson for providing cyanophage isolates S-PM2 and S-WHM1.
PY - 2003/8/28
Y1 - 2003/8/28
N2 - Prochlorococcus is the numerically dominant phototroph in the tropical and subtropical oceans, accounting for half of the photosynthetic biomass in some areas. Here we report the isolation of cyanophages that infect Prochlorococcus, and show that although some are host-strain-specific, others cross-infect with closely related marine Synechococcus as well as between high-light- and low-light-adapted Prochlorococcus isolates, suggesting a mechanism for horizontal gene transfer. High-light-adapted Prochlorococcus hosts yielded Podoviridae exclusively, which were extremely host-specific, whereas low-light-adapted Prochlorococcus and all strains of Synechococcus yielded primarily Myoviridae, which has a broad host range. Finally, both Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus strain-specific cyanophage titres were low (<103m-1) in stratified oligotrophic waters even where total cyanobacterial abundances were high (>105 cells ml -1). These low titres in areas of high total host cell abundance seem to be a feature of open ocean ecosystems. We hypothesize that gradients in cyanobacterial population diversity, growth rates, and/or the incidence of lysogeny underlie these trends.
AB - Prochlorococcus is the numerically dominant phototroph in the tropical and subtropical oceans, accounting for half of the photosynthetic biomass in some areas. Here we report the isolation of cyanophages that infect Prochlorococcus, and show that although some are host-strain-specific, others cross-infect with closely related marine Synechococcus as well as between high-light- and low-light-adapted Prochlorococcus isolates, suggesting a mechanism for horizontal gene transfer. High-light-adapted Prochlorococcus hosts yielded Podoviridae exclusively, which were extremely host-specific, whereas low-light-adapted Prochlorococcus and all strains of Synechococcus yielded primarily Myoviridae, which has a broad host range. Finally, both Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus strain-specific cyanophage titres were low (<103m-1) in stratified oligotrophic waters even where total cyanobacterial abundances were high (>105 cells ml -1). These low titres in areas of high total host cell abundance seem to be a feature of open ocean ecosystems. We hypothesize that gradients in cyanobacterial population diversity, growth rates, and/or the incidence of lysogeny underlie these trends.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=0041375471&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=0041375471&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1038/nature01929
DO - 10.1038/nature01929
M3 - Article
C2 - 12944965
AN - SCOPUS:0041375471
VL - 424
SP - 1047
EP - 1051
JO - Nature
JF - Nature
SN - 0028-0836
IS - 6952
ER -