The Outer Membrane Cytochrome OmcA Is Essential for Infection of Shewanella oneidensis by a Zebrafish-Associated Bacteriophage.

The microbiota-the mixture of microorganisms in the intestinal tract of animals-plays an important role in host biology. Bacteriophages are a prominent, though often overlooked, component of the microbiota. The mechanisms that phage use to infect susceptible cells associated with animal hosts, and the broader role they could play in determining the substituents of the microbiota, are poorly understood. In this study, we isolated a zebrafish-associated bacteriophage, which we named Shewanella phage FishSpeaker. This phage infects Shewanella oneidensis strain MR-1, which cannot colonize zebrafish, but it is unable to infect Shewanella xiamenensis strain FH-1, a strain isolated from the zebrafish gut. Our data suggest that FishSpeaker uses the outer membrane decaheme cytochrome OmcA, which is an accessory component of the extracellular electron transfer (EET) pathway in S. oneidensis, as well as the flagellum to recognize and infect susceptible cells. In a zebrafish colony that lacks detectable FishSpeaker, we found that most Shewanella spp. are sensitive to infection and that some strains are resistant to infection. Our results suggest that phage could act as a selectivity filter for zebrafish-associated Shewanella and show that the EET machinery can be targeted by phage in the environment. IMPORTANCE Phage exert selective pressure on bacteria that influences and shapes the composition of microbial populations. However, there is a lack of native, experimentally tractable systems for studying how phage influence microbial population dynamics in complex communities. Here, we show that a zebrafish-associated phage requires both the outer membrane-associated extracellular electron transfer protein OmcA and the flagellum to infect Shewanella oneidensis strain MR-1. Our results suggest that the newly discovered phage-FishSpeaker-could exert selective pressure that restricts which Shewanella spp. colonize zebrafish. Moreover, the requirement of OmcA for infection by FishSpeaker suggests that the phage preferentially infects cells that are oxygen limited, a condition required for OmcA expression and an ecological feature of the zebrafish gut.

Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest.