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  4. Hunt for viruses reveals diverse phages in alpine streams
 
conference poster not in proceedings

Hunt for viruses reveals diverse phages in alpine streams

Chin, Wai Hoe  
•
Akira Harding
•
Boutroux, Martin  
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September 28, 2025
18th Symposium on Aquatic Microbial Ecology

Microbial biofilms colonizing streambeds critically drive ecological and biogeochemical processes in streams globally. While their significance is increasingly recognized, the role of bacteriophages (phages) – viruses that infect bacteria – remains underexplored. Here, we introduce the Alpine Lotic Phage (ALP) collection; a pioneering initiative to isolate and characterize phages from alpine streams. We collected over 120 litres of water from a Swiss mountain stream which were filtered, concentrated, and screened against 40 bacterial species isolated from stream biofilms. This effort yielded 60 double-purified phage isolates infecting 15 different bacterial species. Soft-agar assays and electron microscopy revealed diverse plaque morphologies and tailed virus structures, while genome sequencing uncovered a wide range of genome sizes (~27 to 360 kbp). Genomic annotation also indicated the presence of putative temperate phages and numerous uncharacterized genes. We next challenged biofilm-forming bacteria with ALP phages and report that while static biofilms were largely unaffected, phages strongly inhibited biofilm growth under flow conditions in microfluidic devices, suggesting a context-dependent impact of alpine phages on biofilm development. Collectively, the ALP collection highlights an untapped reservoir of phages in alpine streams with efforts ongoing to further expand the viral collection and to explore phage–biofilm interactions in lotic ecosystems.

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Type
conference poster not in proceedings
Author(s)
Chin, Wai Hoe  

EPFL

Akira Harding

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Boutroux, Martin  

EPFL

Baier, Florian  

EPFL

Battin, Tom Ian  

EPFL

Peter, Hannes  

EPFL

Date Issued

2025-09-28

Subjects

microbiology

•

environmental

•

bacteriophage

•

biofilm

•

culture collection

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
RIVER  
Event nameEvent acronymEvent placeEvent date
18th Symposium on Aquatic Microbial Ecology

SAME18

Barcelona, Spain

2025-09-28 - 2025-10-03

Available on Infoscience
March 27, 2026
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/262053
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