期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：1999
卷号：96
期号：5
页码：2192-2197
DOI：10.1073/pnas.96.5.2192
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：We report DNA and predicted protein sequence similarities, implying homology, among genes of double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) bacteriophages and prophages spanning a broad phylogenetic range of host bacteria. The sequence matches reported here establish genetic connections, not always direct, among the lambdoid phages of Escherichia coli, phage {varphi}C31 of Streptomyces, phages of Mycobacterium, a previously unrecognized cryptic prophage, {varphi}flu, in the Haemophilus influenzae genome, and two small prophage-like elements, {varphi}Rv1 and {varphi}Rv2, in the genome of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The results imply that these phage genes, and very possibly all of the dsDNA tailed phages, share common ancestry. We propose a model for the genetic structure and dynamics of the global phage population in which all dsDNA phage genomes are mosaics with access, by horizontal exchange, to a large common genetic pool but in which access to the gene pool is not uniform for all phage.
