Characterization of bacteriophage peptides of pathogenic Streptococcus by LC-ESI-MS/MS: bacteriophage phylogenomics and their relationship to their host

15 pages, 3 figures, 1 table.-- This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY)The present work focuses on LC-ESI-MS/MS (liquid chromatography-electrospray ionization-tandem mass spectrometry) analysis of phage-origin tryptic digestion peptides from mastitis-causing Streptococcus spp. isolated from milk. A total of 2,546 non-redundant peptides belonging to 1,890 proteins were identified and analyzed. Among them, 65 phage-origin peptides were determined as specific Streptococcus spp. peptides. These peptides belong to proteins such as phage repressors, phage endopeptidases, structural phage proteins, and uncharacterized phage proteins. Studies involving bacteriophage phylogeny and the relationship between phages encoding the peptides determined and the bacteria they infect were also performed. The results show how specific peptides are present in closely related phages, and a link exists between bacteriophage phylogeny and the Streptococcus spp. they infect. Moreover, the phage peptide M∗ATNLGQAYVQIM∗PSAK is unique and specific for Streptococcus agalactiae. These results revealed that diagnostic peptides, among others, could be useful for the identification and characterization of mastitis-causing Streptococcus spp., particularly peptides that belong to specific functional proteins, such as phage-origin proteins, because of their specificity to bacterial hostsThis work has received financial support from the Xunta de Galicia and the European Union (European Social Fund – ESF), by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity Project AGL 2.013-48.244-R and by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) (2007–2013). This work was also supported by the GAIN-Xunta de Galicia Project (IN607D 2017/01). MC is supported by the Ramón y Cajal contract (Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain)Peer reviewe