The interaction was captured in astonishing detail using a microscope that fires beams of electrons at its subject. The finding revealed how these two different viruses, both categorized as"bacteriophages," interact and may have co-evolved.
The never-before-seen interaction was described in a study published Oct. 31 in the Journal of the International Society for Microbial Ecology. The authors analyzed the genomes of these bacteriophages as well as their bacterial hosts and discovered that the satellites had genes that coded for their outer protein shell but not the key genes needed to replicate within bacterial cells. This further supported the idea that these two types of bacteriophages were interacting with each other.
"These findings demonstrate an ever-increasing array of satellite strategies for genetic dependence on their helpers in the evolutionary arms race between satellite and helper phages," the authors wrote in the study.