Isolation and sequencing of three RB49-like bacteriophages infecting O antigen-producing E. coli strains

E. coli strains 4s, F5 and F17, whose O antigens are structurally characterized and shown to effectively shield the cell surface from bacteriophage attack, were used as the hosts to isolate novel RB49-like bacteriophages. Three  novel phage isolates were obtained, and their genomes were sequenced and annotated. Despite high overall identity levels of these genomic sequences, the variants of large distal tail fiber subunit, orthologous to the bacteriophage T2 long tail receptor recognition protein gp38, were unique for each phage, suggesting their role in host range determination. The annotated genomes are available via NCBI Genbank, acc. numbers MZ504876-MZ504878.