AUTHOR=Feyereisen Marine , Mahony Jennifer , Neve Horst , Franz Charles M. A. P. , Noben Jean-Paul , O’Sullivan Tadhg , Boer Viktor , van Sinderen Douwe TITLE=Biodiversity and Classification of Phages Infecting Lactobacillus brevis JOURNAL=Frontiers in Microbiology VOLUME=10 YEAR=2019 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/microbiology/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2019.02396 DOI=10.3389/fmicb.2019.02396 ISSN=1664-302X ABSTRACT=

Lactobacillus brevis is a lactic acid bacterium that is known as a food and beverage spoilage organism, and more specifically as a beer-spoiler. Phages of L. brevis have been described, but very limited data is available regarding temperate phages of L. brevis. Temperate phages may exert benefits to the host, while they may also be employed to combat beer spoilage. The current study reports on the incidence of prophage sequences present in nineteen distinct L. brevis genomes. Prophage induction was evaluated using mitomycin C exposure followed by genome targeted-PCR, electron microscopy and structural proteome analysis. The morphological and genome sequence analyses revealed significant diversity among L. brevis prophages, which appear to be dominated by members of the Myoviridae phage family. Based on this analysis, we propose a classification of L. brevis phages into five groups.