ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Temperate phages both mediate and drive adaptive evolution in pathogen biofilms.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 69 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
69 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 109 citations in OpenAlex.
- Phage diversity in human breast milk: a systematic review.European journal of pediatrics · 2025Pooled it
- CRISPR-Cas immune repertoires as an ecological record of bacterial interactions with mobile genetic elements in the human gut.Gut microbes · 2026Article
- The role of phages in plant-associated microbial communities.Essays in biochemistry · 2026Review
- Chemical prophage induction selectively removes Vibrio from a pelagic Sargassum-derived multispecies biofilm.Environmental microbiome · 2026Article
- Review
- Phages and quorum sensing: findings to consider in phage therapy.European journal of clinical microbiology & infectious diseases : official publication of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology · 2026Review
- Co-infection withISME communications · 2026Article
- Phage diversity mirrors bacterial strain diversity in the honey bee gut microbiota.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Bacteria-phage infection network structure and genomic defence system content predict efficacy of a phage therapy cocktail againstPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Pseudomonas aeruginosa maintains an inducible array of novel and diverse prophages over lengthy persistence in cystic fibrosis lungs.FEMS microbiology letters · 2025Article
- Article
- What makes a temperate phage an effective bacterial weapon?mSystems · 2024Article
- The role of rhizosphere phages in soil health.FEMS microbiology ecology · 2024Review
- Secondary messenger signalling influences Pseudomonas aeruginosa adaptation to sinus and lung environments.The ISME journal · 2024Article
- Bacterial defences: mechanisms, evolution and antimicrobial resistance.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2023Review
- Topical Bacteriophage Therapy for Staphylococcal Superficial Pyoderma in Horses: A Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Pilot Study.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Unveil the Secret of the Bacteria and Phage Arms Race.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Review
- Antibiotics Limit Adaptation of Drug-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus to Hypoxia.Antimicrobial agents and chemotherapy · 2022Article
- Modulation of Biofilm Mechanics by DNA Structure and Cell Type.ACS biomaterials science & engineering · 2022Article
- Mining bacterial NGS data vastly expands the complete genomes of temperate phages.NAR genomics and bioinformatics · 2022Article
9 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Temperate phages drive genomic diversification in bacterial pathogens. Phage-derived sequences are more common in pathogenic than nonpathogenic taxa and are associated with changes in pathogen virulence. High abundance and mobilization of temperate phages within hosts suggests that temperate phages could promote within-host evolution of bacterial pathogens. However, their role in pathogen evolution has not been experimentally tested. We experimentally evolved replicate populations of Pseudomonas aeruginosa with or without a community of three temperate phages active in cystic fibrosis (CF) lung infections, including the transposable phage, ɸ4, which is closely related to phage D3112. Populations grew as free-floating biofilms in artificial sputum medium, mimicking sputum of CF lungs where P. aeruginosa is an important pathogen and undergoes evolutionary adaptation and diversification during chronic infection. Although bacterial populations adapted to the biofilm environment in both treatments, population genomic analysis revealed that phages altered both the trajectory and mode of evolution. Populations evolving with phages exhibited a greater degree of parallel evolution and faster selective sweeps than populations without phages. Phage ɸ4 integrated randomly into the bacterial chromosome, but integrations into motility-associated genes and regulators of quorum sensing systems essential for virulence were selected in parallel, strongly suggesting that these insertional inactivation mutations were adaptive. Temperate phages, and in particular transposable phages, are therefore likely to facilitate adaptive evolution of bacterial pathogens within hosts.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.