Background: Temperate phages influence the density, diversity and function of bacterial populations. Historically, they have been described as carriers of toxins. More recently, they have also been recognised as direct modulators of the gut microbiome, and indirectly of host health and disease. Despite recent advances in studying prophages using non-targeted sequencing approaches, methodological challenges in identifying inducible prophages in bacterial genomes and quantifying their activity have limited our understanding of prophage-host interactions.
Results: We present methods for using high-throughput sequencing data to locate inducible prophages, including those previously undiscovered, to quantify prophage activity and to investigate their replication. We first used the well-established Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium/p22 system to validate our methods for (i) quantifying phage-to-host ratios and (ii) accurately locating inducible prophages in the reference genome based on phage-to-host ratio differences and read alignment alterations between induced and non-induced prophages. Investigating prophages in bacterial strains from a murine gut model microbiota known as Oligo-MM12 or sDMDMm2, we located five novel inducible prophages in three strains, quantified their activity and showed signatures of lateral transduction potential for two of them. Furthermore, we show that the methods were also applicable to metagenomes of induced faecal samples from Oligo-MM12 mice, including for strains with a relative abundance below 1%, illustrating its potential for the discovery of inducible prophages also in more complex metagenomes. Finally, we show that predictions of prophage locations in reference genomes of the strains we studied were variable and inconsistent for four bioinformatic tools we tested, which highlights the importance of their experimental validation.
Conclusions: This study demonstrates that the integration of experimental induction and bioinformatic analysis presented here is a powerful approach to accurately locate inducible prophages using high-throughput sequencing data and to quantify their activity. The ability to generate such quantitative information will be critical in helping us to gain better insights into the factors that determine phage activity and how prophage-bacteria interactions influence our microbiome and impact human health. Video abstract.
Keywords: Gut microbiota; High-throughput sequencing; Phage activity; Phage replication; Phage-to-host ratio; Prophage induction; Prophage localisation.