Phys.org  February 13, 2024 Majority of the Bacteriophages are uncharacterized, and their hosts are unknown. A team of researchers in the US (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Oregon Health & Science University, Iowa State University) applied high-throughput chromosome conformation capture (Hi–C) to directly capture phage-host relationships. Some hosts had high centralities in bacterial community co-occurrence networks, suggesting phage infections have an important impact on the soil bacterial community interactions. They observed increased average viral copies per host (VPH) and decreased viral transcriptional activity following a two-week soil-drying incubation, indicating an increase in lysogenic infections. Soil drying also altered the observed phage […]