Journal article

The flagellotropic bacteriophage YSD1 targets Salmonella Typhi with a Chi-like protein tail fibre

RA Dunstan, D Pickard, S Dougan, D Goulding, C Cormie, J Hardy, F Li, R Grinter, K Harcourt, L Yu, J Song, F Schreiber, J Choudhary, S Clare, F Coulibaly, RA Strugnell, G Dougan, T Lithgow

Molecular Microbiology | WILEY | Published : 2019

Abstract

The discovery of a Salmonella-targeting phage from the waterways of the United Kingdom provided an opportunity to address the mechanism by which Chi-like bacteriophage (phage) engages with bacterial flagellae. The long tail fibre seen on Chi-like phages has been proposed to assist the phage particle in docking to a host cell flagellum, but the identity of the protein that generates this fibre was unknown. We present the results from genome sequencing of this phage, YSD1, confirming its close relationship to the original Chi phage and suggesting candidate proteins to form the tail structure. Immunogold labelling in electron micrographs revealed that YSD1_22 forms the main shaft of the tail tu..

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Grants

Awarded by Wellcome Trust


Funding Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the Australian Synchrotron for access to beamlines MX1 and MX2 for X-ray crystallographic analysis (CAP11027) and SAXS-WAXS for X-ray solution scattering (M12480), and the Sanger Institute DNA pipeline team for support in sequencing and assembling the genome of YSD1. We would also like to thank Alex Bateman of the EBI-EMBL for help with the use of the jackhammer software in detecting protein domains. Research was supported by Program Grant 1092262 from the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (NHMRC), The Wellcome Trust and the Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre (National Institute for Medical Research, United Kingdom). R.G. is a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellow (106077/Z/14/Z), T.L. is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow (FL130100038).