A Novel Freshwater Cyanophage, Mae-Yong924-1, Reveals a New Family

Cyanobacterial blooms are a worldwide ecological issue. Cyanophages are aquatic viruses specifically infecting cyanobacteria. Little is known about freshwater cyanophages. In this study, a freshwater cyanophage, Mae-Yong924-1, was isolated by the double-layer agar plate method using Microcystis aeruginosa FACHB-924 as an indicator host. Mae-Yong924-1 has several unusual characteristics: a unique shape, cross-taxonomic order infectivity and a very unique genome sequence. Mae-Yong924-1 contains a nearly spherical head of about 100 nm in diameter. The tail or tail-like structure (approximately 40 nm in length) is like the tassel of a round Chinese lantern. It could lyse six diverse cyanobacteria strains across three orders including Chroococcales, Nostocales and Oscillatoriales. The genome of the cyanophage is 40,325 bp in length, with a G + C content of 48.32%, and 59 predicted open reading frames (ORFs), only 12 (20%) of which were functionally annotated. Both BLASTn and BLASTx scanning resulted in “No significant similarity found”, i.e., the Mae-Yong924-1 genome shared extremely low homology with sequences in NCBI databases. Mae-Yong924-1 formed a root node alone and monopolized a root branch in the proteomic tree based on genome-wide sequence similarities. The results suggest that Mae-Yong924-1 may reveal a new unknown family apparently distinct from other viruses.