Phages in nature

By Martha R. J. Clokie, A. Millard, A. Letarov, S. Heaphy. Bacteriophage, 2011

1,079 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Phages are the most abundant organisms in the biosphere and they are a ubiquitous feature of prokaryotic existence. A bacteriophage is a virus which infects a bacterium. Archaea are also infected by viruses, whether these should be referred to as ‘phages’ is debatable, but they are included as such in the scope this article. Phage have been of interest to scientists as tools to understand fundamental molecular biology, as vectors of horizontal gene transfer and drivers of bacterial evolution, as sources of diagnostic and genetic tools, and as novel therapeutic agents. Unraveling the biology of phages and their relationship with their hosts is key to understanding microbial systems and their exploitation. In this article we describe the roles of phages in different host systems and show how modeling, microscopy, isolation, genomic and metagenomic based approaches have come together recently to provide unparalleled insights into these small but vital constituents of the microbial world.

Subfields: Ecology, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/841fd90827ea4125b5a0fcc9eb646595bf03c488

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Citations in the corpus

Viruses in soil: Nano-scale undead drivers of microbial life, biogeochemical turnover and ecosystem functions (2018, background): “A virus in this state is termed a prophage, and lysogenic infections can persist for many generations of the host (Clokie et al., 2011).”
Bacteria–phage coevolution as a driver of ecological and evolutionary processes in microbial communities (2014, background): “The wealth of literature describing bacterial and phage diversity in nature (reviewed in Weinbauer, 2004; Breitbart & Rohwer, 2005; Clokie et al., 2011) is suggestive of on-going coevolutionary dynamics, but the role of coevolution relative to other factors such as dispersal or selection by the…”
Advantages and Limitations of Bacteriophages for the Treatment of Bacterial Infections (2019, background): “Moreover, they have been detected in hospitals, in wastewater and where bacteria can live, including animal and human tissues (Clokie et al., 2011).”
Disease-specific Alterations in the Enteric Virome in Inflammatory Bowel Disease (2015, background): “The biology of bacteriophages has been extensively reviewed (Brüssow et al., 2004; Clokie et al., 2011; Fortier and Sekulovic, 2013).”