Invited Speaker Australian Society for Microbiology Annual Scientific Meeting 2018

Single cell viral tagging (#132)

Maria Dzunkova 1 , Soo Jen Low 1 , Joshua Daly 1 , Li Deng 2 , Christian Rinke 1 , Philip Hugenholtz 1
  1. Australian Centre for Ecogenomics, School of Chemistry & Molecular Biosciences, University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, Australia
  2. Helmholtz Zentrum München-German Research Center for Environmental Health, Institute of Virology, Neuherberg 85764, Germany

Viral discovery is accelerating at an unprecedented rate due to continuing advances in culture-independent sequence-based analyses. One important facet of this discovery is identification of the hosts of these newly characterised uncultured viruses. To this end, we have developed a single cell viral tagging approach. Fluorescently labeled anonymous virions are allowed to adsorb to unlabeled anonymous bacterial host cells which are then individually sorted as virus-host pairs, followed by genome amplification and high throughput sequencing to establish the identities of both the host and attached virus(es). We show the application of this method in the human gut microbiome including cross-tagging of viruses and bacteria between subjects.