Systematic mapping of bacteriophage gene essentiality with HIDEN-SEQ.

HIDEN-SEQ reveals conditionally essential viral genes, including unknown antidefence factors, across diverse bacterial hosts and growth conditions in phage T4.

• Why it matters: Understanding phage gene functions is crucial for advancing biotechnology and phage therapy, but many phage genes remain uncharacterized, limiting progress in combating bacterial pathogens.
• What they did: The authors developed HIDEN-SEQ, a transposon-insertion sequencing method, and demonstrated its ability to reproduce known gene essentiality maps in phage T4 and identify new conditionally essential genes in various hosts and conditions.
• The result: HIDEN-SEQ enables systematic linking of viral genes to phenotypes, facilitating discoveries relevant to microbial ecology, biotechnology, and phage therapy, and is adaptable to diverse non-model phages.