Novel Cluster AZ Arthrobacter phages Powerpuff, Lego, and YesChef exhibit close functional relationships with Microbacterium phages

Abstract Bacteriophages exhibit a vast spectrum of relatedness and there is increasing evidence of close genomic relationships independent of host genus. The variability in phage similarity at the nucleotide, amino acid, and gene content levels confounds attempts at quantifying phage relatedness, especially as more novel phages are isolated. This study describes three highly similar novel Arthrobacter globiformis phages–Powerpuff, Lego, and YesChef–which were assigned to Cluster AZ using a nucleotide-based clustering parameter. Phages in Cluster AZ and Microbacterium Cluster EH, as well as the former Microbacterium singleton Zeta1847, exhibited low nucleotide similarity but gene content similarity in excess of the recently adopted Microbacterium clustering parameter, which resulted in the reassignment of Zeta1847 to Cluster EH. Additionally, Clusters AZ and EH phages encode a shared integrase indicative of a lysogenic life cycle; in the first experimental verification of a Cluster AZ phage’s life cycle, we show that phage Powerpuff is a true temperate phage and forms stable lysogens that exhibit immunity to superinfection by related phages, despite lacking identifiable repressors typically required for lysogenic maintenance and superinfection immunity. The ability of phage Powerpuff to undergo and maintain lysogeny suggests that other closely related phages encoding an integrase but lacking an identified repressor may be temperate as well. Our findings further highlight the importance of using multiple metrics to capture phage relatedness, provide additional evidence of significant shared phage genomic content spanning multiple actinobacterial host genera, and demonstrate the continued need for verification and characterization of life cycles in newly isolated phages.