Phage–host interactions are a key driver of microbial ecology, but observing them in nature is hard! 🧩

🧪 🌊 Together with Francisco Nadal-Molero & Ana Belen Martin-Cuadrado we used metaHi-C to detect freshwater phage–host pairs and link their infection dynamics to their co-evolution. A joint adventure by MULTIPHAGE and VIRHOS projects!

🦠 From >900 microbial and >33,000 viral Hi-C assembled genomes, we recovered 100 high-confidence phage–host links. These span dominant freshwater taxa including: Limnohabitans, Synechococcus, Ca. Nanopelagicus, Ca. Planktophila, Polynucleobacter & more.

The infection network reveals multiple ecological strategies in Freshwater phages:

- Broad host range

- One-to-one specialists

- Kill-the-winner dynamics

Annnnndddd 🥁

- Cellular level co-infection (something we are resolving in our MULTIPHAGE ERC-StG project)

✅ We can finally see where ecology meets evolution in phage-bacteria interactions in natural samples!