Warming alters life-history traits and competition in a phage community
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Host-parasite interactions are highly susceptible to changes in temperature due to mismatches in species thermal responses. In nature, parasites often exist in communities, and responses to temperature are expected to vary between host-parasite pairs. Temperature change thus has consequences for both host-parasite dynamics and parasite-parasite interactions. Here, we investigate the impact of warming (37°C, 40°C, and 42°C) on parasite life-history traits and competition using the opportunistic bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa (host) and a panel of three genetically diverse lytic bacteriophages (parasites). We show that phages vary in their responses to temperature. While 37°C and 40°C did not have a major effect on phage infectivity, infection by two phages was restricted at 42°C. This outcome was attributed to disruption of different phage life-history traits including host attachment and replication inside hosts. Furthermore, we show that temperature mediates competition between phages by altering their competitiveness. These results highlight phage trait variation across thermal regimes with the potential to drive community dynamics. Our results have important implications for eukaryotic viromes and the design of phage cocktail therapies. IMPORTANCE Mammalian hosts often elevate their body temperatures through fevers to restrict the growth of bacterial infections. However, the extent to which fever temperatures affect the communities of phages with the ability to parasitize those bacteria remains unclear. In this study, we investigate the impact of warming across a fever temperature range (37°C, 40°C, and 42°C) on phage life-history traits and competition using a bacterium (host) and bacteriophage (parasite) system. We show that phages vary in their responses to temperature due to disruption of different phage life-history traits. Furthermore, we show that temperature can alter phage competitiveness and shape phage-phage competition outcomes. These results suggest that fever temperatures have the potential to restrict phage infectivity and drive phage community dynamics. We discuss implications for the role of temperature in shaping host-parasite interactions more widely.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".