ReviewVirus evolution2022
Phenotypic flux: The role of physiology in explaining the conundrum of bacterial persistence amid phage attack.
Review in Virus evolution, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Inferring single-cell heterogeneity of bacteriophage lysis-associated life-history traits from population-scale dynamics.Science advances · 2026Article
- Rage against the mean: a perspective on measuring fitness of individual phage particles.Npj viruses · 2026Review
- Coexistence of Photosynthetic Marine Microorganisms, Viruses and Grazers: Towards Integration in Ocean Ecosystem Models.Environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Modeling the Phage Properties Best for Therapy.Viruses · 2026Article
- Article
- Towards accurate artificial intelligence models for strain-level phage-host prediction.Briefings in bioinformatics · 2026Article
- Modeling the phage properties best for therapy.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- The intestinal environment potentiates bacteriophage adaptation in response to phenotypic resistance inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Quantifying phage infectivity from characteristics of bacterial population dynamics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Article
- Naturally competent bacteria and their genetic parasites-a battle for control over horizontal gene transfer?FEMS microbiology reviews · 2025Review
- CleanBar: a versatile demultiplexing tool for split-and-pool barcoding in single-cell omics.ISME communications · 2025Article
- Microscopic phage adsorption assay: High-throughput quantification of virus particle attachment to host bacterial cells.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Bacteria-phage coevolution with a seed bank.The ISME journal · 2023Article
- Human-Gut Phages Harbor Sporulation Genes.mBio · 2023Article
- Ecology and Evolutionary Biology of Hindering Phage Therapy: The Phage Tolerance vs. Phage Resistance of Bacterial Biofilms.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Droplet-based methodology for investigating bacterial population dynamics in response to phage exposure.Frontiers in microbiology · 2023Article
- Multispecies biofilm architecture determines bacterial exposure to phages.PLoS biology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Bacteriophages, the viruses of bacteria, have been studied for over a century. They were not only instrumental in laying the foundations of molecular biology, but they are also likely to play crucial roles in shaping our biosphere and may offer a solution to the control of drug-resistant bacterial infections. However, it remains challenging to predict the conditions for bacterial eradication by phage predation, sometimes even under well-defined laboratory conditions, and, most curiously, if the majority of surviving cells are genetically phage-susceptible. Here, I propose that even clonal phage and bacterial populations are generally in a state of continuous 'phenotypic flux', which is caused by transient and nongenetic variation in phage and bacterial physiology. Phenotypic flux can shape phage infection dynamics by reducing the force of infection to an extent that allows for coexistence between phages and susceptible bacteria. Understanding the mechanisms and impact of phenotypic flux may be key to providing a complete picture of phage-bacteria coexistence. I review the empirical evidence for phenotypic variation in phage and bacterial physiology together with the ways they have been modeled and discuss the potential implications of phenotypic flux for ecological and evolutionary dynamics between phages and bacteria, as well as for phage therapy.
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