Community ecology of phages on a clonal bacterial host

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Bacteriophages are the most abundant and diverse biological entities on Earth, yet the ecological mechanisms that sustain this extraordinary diversity remain unclear. Here, we have discovered a general mechanism that allows phage diversity to outstrip the diversity of their bacterial hosts. We assembled and passaged dozens of diverse phage communities on a single, non-coevolving strain of Escherichia coli until the phage communities reached equilibrium. In all cases, we found multiple phage species coexisted stably, despite competition for a single, clonal host population. Coexistence within these communities was supported through host phenotypic heterogeneity, whereby phages specialized on cells adopting different growth phenotypes. Our experiments reveal a rich community ecology of bacteriophages where multiple phage species coexist and interact at the scale of a single bacterial host. One-Sentence Summary Diverse communities of phages emerge stably and consistently on a clonal bacterial host, enabled by phenotypic heterogeneity.