“…Numerous crAss-like phages have been predicted to infect bacteria of the phylum Bacteroidetes (Dutilh et al , 2014; Yutin et al , 2021), and accordingly, several crAss-like phages have been isolated in cultures of Bacteroidetes hosts or enriched in the presence of Bacteroidetes hosts (Fitzgerald et al, 2021; Guerin et al, 2021; Hryckowian et al, 2020; Shkoporov et al , 2018), although there is also evidence that some crAss-like phages may infect hosts from different phyla (Yutin et al , 2021). Apparently, crAss-like phages may coexist with their hosts relatively peacefully, as the same crAss-like phages were often recurrently detected in metagenomic samples of longitudinal study participants (Edwards et al, 2019; Shkoporov et al, 2019; Siranosian et al, 2020) and four crAss-like phages were shown to persist in the cultures of their hosts for a long time without a significant reduction in the host population (Guerin et al , 2021; Shkoporov et al , 2018; Shkoporov et al , 2021). Interestingly, hosts were shown to develop resistance to crAss-like phage infection via the phase variation mechanism: inversions in the bacterial genome loci responsible for cell surface coating biosynthesis were linked to altered cell surface architecture and a reduced ability of the bacteria to absorb phage (Shkoporov et al , 2021).…”