Summary Microbes drive ecosystem functioning and their viruses modulate these impacts through mortality, gene transfer and metabolic reprogramming. Despite the importance of virus‐host interactions and likely variable infection efficiencies of individual phages across hosts, such variability is seldom quantified. Here, we quantify infection efficiencies of 38 phages against 19 host strains in aquatic Cellulophaga ( Bacteroidet...

Summary Bacterial viruses (phages) are abundant, ecologically important biological entities. However, our understanding of their impact is limited by model systems that are primarily not well represented in nature, e.g. E nterophages and their hosts. Here, we investigate genomic characteristics and infection strategies among six aquatic B acteroidetes phages that represent two genera of exceptionally large (∼70–75 kb genome) p...

Summary Microbes drive the biogeochemical cycles that fuel planet E arth, and their viruses (phages) alter microbial population structure, genome repertoire, and metabolic capacity. However, our ability to understand and quantify phage–host interactions is technique‐limited. Here, we introduce phage FISH – a markedly improved gene FISH protocol that increases gene detection efficiency from 40% to > 92% and is optimized for det...