Huge congrats to @vyshakhrp.bsky.social for pulling this through, and to our fantastic collaborators from University of Wroclaw, University of Copenhagen, Lund University and Manchester Metropolitan University!
Rafal Mostowy
Mushuvirus is the most widespread phage genus in the human gut. 🌍
Together with other family members, these viruses occur in 89% of humans worldwide, including the Iceman Ötzi!
How is it possible that they were hidden in previous metagenomic analyses?
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Read: doi.org/10.64898/202...
Piotr Rozwalak
Phage receptor-binding proteins are known for their LEGO-like modularity, but we still do not fully understand their evolutionary potential and how it shapes phage host range. Our new preprint examines this systematically in Klebsiella phages. 🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Thread 🧵
We modelled all 382 RBPs with AlphaFold3 and resolved 39 structurally distinct classes — including 18 never described before — across all morphotypes. This is what the structural diversity of Klebsiella phage RBPs actually looks like.
We propose 5 receptor-recognition strategies targeting the K. pneumoniae surface: capsule, O-antigen, LPS core, outer membrane proteins, resulting in diverse infection strategies. The full structural atlas is freely available at Klebsiella-Phage-RBP-Atlas. 🔗 vyshakhrp.github.io/klebsiella-r...
The dataset: 192 Klebsiella phages across 3 morphotypes — podoviruses, siphoviruses, myoviruses (incl. jumbophages) — spanning 96 capsule types, with halo phenotypes and empirical and genetic host-range all determined. The broadest K. pneumoniae phage collection studied structurally to date.
Structurally different RBPs often share near-identical N-terminals. The most striking case: within Webervirus, near-identical genomes swap a depolymerase for an L-shaped tail fiber at a single locus — 85% N-terminal identity preserved, host-range changed.
RBPs showed remarkable levels of structural modularity. The most common type was N-terminal sharing, but other types were also observed (C-terminal sharing/variation, region conservation, recomb. hotspots). Many of these were relatively recent.
