The role of enrichment in decreasing diversity of mycobacteriophage genome databases

While there is great genetic diversity among phages, a large proportion of mycobacteriopphages fall into only a few clusters. Does the observed distribution of members in clusters actually reflect what is present in nature or does the enrichment procedure cause a skew in diversity? We hypothesize that the enrichment procedure promotes the replication of phages belonging to only a few clusters, thus decreasing the diversity of phages identified from a sample. Using nanopore sequencing to conduct a metagenomics analysis of soil samples, a decrease in the number of clusters present in enriched samples, compared to unenriched samples, was observed. The data supports the hypothesis and demonstrates that enrichment promotes the growth of only a select few clusters and subclusters, making it more likely to isolate phages of these clusters and subclusters. With the growing potential and prevalence of phage applications, it is important to expand our knowledge on their diversity. Conducting studies on phage diversity not only leads to a larger array of phages to use for applications, but also gives us more information on how phages interact with their environment