Synergy and antagonism in a genome-scale model of metabolic hijacking by bacteriophages.

Abstract

Bacteriophage auxiliary metabolic genes (AMGs) alter host metabolism by hijacking reactions, but previous studies mostly inferred their roles from annotations, ignoring system-wide impacts and phage production. Here we integrate AMGs and phage assembly into a genome-scale metabolic model of <i>Prochloroccocus marinus</i> MED4 infected by P-HM2. We show that 17 directly hijacked reactions substantially affect more than 30% of the reactions in MED4 metabolism, including carbon fixation, photosynthesis, and nucleotide synthesis, distinguishing these AMGs as either phage aligned-shifting feasible reaction velocities in accordance with maximal phage production-or phage antialigned. Pareto optimization reveals that phage-aligned reactions alter phage-host growth trade-offs, while phage-antialigned reactions do not. We experimentally validate our predictions of system-level AMG impacts by measuring the N-dependent effect of P-HM2 <i>cp12</i> expression on growth in a model relative of the genetically intractable MED4, <i>Synechococcus elongatus</i>. We also show that AMGs' indirect impacts are synergistically and antagonistically coupled, providing systems-level insight into AMG perturbations and highlighting how nontrivial cascading effects shape host metabolism.