Abstract:

Although the circadian clock systems have been widely studied in from animals, plants to prokaryotes, the influence of virus infection on the host’s circadian clock is largely unexplored. Cyanobacteria, the numerically dominant and also the smallest photosynthetic organisms on Earth, are good models for the study of circadian clock. Here by three-dimensional super-resolution imaging in the marine cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus with stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM), we reported the first evidence that virus infection can disturb the intracellular organization of host’s circadian clock proteins. While the core circadian oscillator KaiC is mainly diffusely distributed in Prochlorococcus cell in the day and tends to aggregate as a focus at night, the cyanophage P-SSM2 infection of Prochlorococcus NATL2A at night reduces the proportion of cells with a KaiC focus to nearly the daytime level. Our results shed new light on the manipulation that viruses can make during the infection, possibly for a better utilization of the host’s intracellular metabolic environment.

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