Coordinated transcriptional response to environmental stress by a Synechococcus virus

Viruses are a major control on populations of microbes. Often, their virulence is examined in controlled laboratory conditions. Yet, in nature, environmental conditions lead to changes in host physiology and fitness that may impart both costs and benefits on viral success. Phosphorus (P) is a major abiotic control on the marine cyanobacterium Synechococcus. Some viruses infecting Synechococcus have acquired, from their host, a gene encoding a P substrate binding protein (PstS), thought to improve virus replication under phosphate starvation. Yet, pstS is uncommon among cyanobacterial viruses. Thus, we asked how infections with viruses lacking PstS are affected by P scarcity. We show that the production of infectious virus particles of such viruses is reduced in low P conditions. However, this reduction in progeny is not caused by impaired phage genome replication, thought to be a major sink for cellular phosphate. Instead, transcriptomic analysis showed that under low P conditions, a PstS-lacking cyanophage increased the expression of a specific gene set that included mazG, hli2, and gp43 encoding a pyrophosphatase, a high-light inducible protein and DNA polymerase, respectively. Moreover, several of the upregulated genes were controlled by the host's phoBR two-component system. We hypothesize that recycling and polymerization of nucleotides liberates free phosphate and thus allows viral morphogenesis, albeit at lower rates than when phosphate is replete or when phages encode pstS. Altogether, our data show how phage genomes, lacking obvious P-stress-related genes, have evolved to exploit their host's environmental sensing mechanisms to coordinate their own gene expression in response to resource limitation.