Broad host range may be a key to long-term persistence of bacteriophages infecting intestinal Bacteroidaceae species

The longitudinal studies have found that the human gut microbiota is stable over time with some major bacterial lineages or even strains persisting for years. This was recently extended to gut bacteriophages using the metagenomic data. Here, we focused on cultivation of the major Bacteroidetes of human gut, the Bacteroides and Phocaeicola strains, and their bacteriophages from two healthy donors. The persistence of Bacteroides and Phocaeicola species and strains was confirmed. We isolated 28 genetically different phages grouped into seven distinct clusters, two of these were new. Moreover, the bacteriophages from several groups, although being genetically quite homogeneous, had the ability to infect the strains belonging to different species isolated from several sampling time-points and different donors. We propose that the ability to infect several host species, which differ in their nutritional niches, may promote long-term persistence of dominant gut bacteriophage groups.