Plant-associated phages across scales: ecological and evolutionary principles for a neglected virosphere.
Huerta AI, Joglekar P, Totsline N, D'Amico-Willman KM, Ritchie DF
Soil Health
The reason phage-based sprays to protect your tomatoes from bacterial wilt keep failing in real gardens — even after they work in the lab — likely comes down to ecological principles that researchers are only now beginning to map.
Every plant is home to billions of bacteria, and those bacteria are hunted by even tinier viruses called phages. Scientists have studied these virus-bacteria battles in the ocean and in our guts, but barely looked at what happens inside a leaf or a root. This review pulls together the clues we do have and explains why the same phage treatment that wipes out harmful bacteria in a greenhouse can completely fizzle when you try it outdoors — scale, environment, and the genetics of the local microbial community all matter enormously.
Key Findings
Plant-associated phages show both long-term genomic stability and localized adaptive divergence, meaning phage populations evolve differently depending on the specific plant environment they inhabit.
Spatial structure, host population genetics, environmental heterogeneity, and fluctuating selection jointly shape how phages infect bacteria in plant microbiomes — explaining inconsistent field performance of phage-based biocontrol products.
Major technical bottlenecks — including contamination from plant and bacterial host DNA and fewer than expected phage genomes isolated from plant ecosystems — have left the plant virosphere among the least characterized on Earth.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Viruses that infect bacteria (bacteriophages) are surprisingly common in the microbial communities living on and in plants, but scientists have largely ignored them compared to phages in oceans or the human gut. This review synthesizes what we know and maps out why understanding these plant-associated phages could improve how we fight plant diseases without chemicals.
Abstract Preview
Bacteriophages are abundant and influential members of plant-associated microbiomes, yet their ecological and evolutionary roles are less explored than those of marine, soil or clinical virospheres...
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