PubMed · 2026-05-28
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.
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.