Improving the Safety of Staphylococcus aureus Polyvalent Phages by Their Production on a Staphylococcus xylosus Strain

Team1 (vB_SauM_Team1) is a polyvalent staphylococcal phage belonging to the Myoviridae family. Phage Team1 was propagated on a Staphylococcus aureus strain and a non-pathogenic Staphylococcus xylosus strain used in industrial meat fermentation. The two Team1 preparations were compared with respect to their microbiological and genomic properties. The burst sizes, latent periods, and host ranges of the two derivatives were identical as were their genome sequences. Phage Team1 has 140,903 bp of double stranded DNA encoding for 217 open reading frames and 4 tRNAs. Comparative genomic analysis revealed similarities to staphylococcal phages ISP (97%) and G1 (97%). The host range of Team1 was compared to the well-known polyvalent staphylococcal phages phi812 and K using a panel of 57 S. aureus strains collected from various sources. These bacterial strains were found to represent 18 sequence types (MLST) and 14 clonal complexes (eBURST). Altogether, the three phages propagated on S. xylosus lysed 52 out of 57 distinct strains of S. aureus. The identification of phage-insensitive strains underlines the importance of designing phage cocktails with broadly varying and overlapping host ranges. Taken altogether, our study suggests that some staphylococcal phages can be propagated on food-grade bacteria for biocontrol and safety purposes.