Genes associated with cyanophage infection: a review

Abstract:

Cyanophages are viruses that infect cyanobacteria. They are able to regulate the abundance and diversity of the cyanobacterial populations, and play a critical role in food web dynamics and biogeochemical cycling of many aquatic ecosystems. Cyanophages perform various interactions with the host cells, such as adsorption, invasion and replication, and thereby participate in infection process and complete their life cycle. Based on the relation between cyanophage life cycle and the genome structure, the review mainly introduced several significant cyanophage proteins that interact with cyanobacteria, such as viral attachment proteins, endopeptidases, holins, DNA polymerases, non-bleaching protein A (NblA), virulence factors, virulence factors, anti-CRISPR proteins (Acr), and small heat shock proteins, and thereby analyzed their molecular characteristics and elaborated the molecular mechanisms of cyanophage infection and cyanophage-cyanobacterium interaction. To comprehensively know the driving strategy, infection efficiency and ecological influence of diverse cyanophages with their hosts and aquatic environments, this review not only summarized and discussed the research advances and trends on these significant genes associated with cyanophage infection, but also proposed significant ideas for performing extensive function studies on the related genes with cyanophage infection by using new gene editing technology, and thereby to expand global aquatic virus databases and to enable us to understand more about mechanisms of interaction between cyanophages and the host cyanobacteria.