Eliminating the type I restriction endonuclease from Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1 for optimized phage isolation

Phage therapy is a promising treatment for multidrug-resistant bacterial infections. Due to their high host specificity, phages must be matched to the target clinical strains. Efficiently identifying appropriate phages and producing sufficient titres for clinical use requires comprehensive phage libraries and multiple propagation hosts. An idealized system would use a highly promiscuous bacterial host to isolate a broader range of phages and streamline optimized phage production. Anti-phage defences constrain bacterial host promiscuity, such as restriction-modification systems that recognize and cleave foreign DNA. Here, the type I restriction endonuclease, HsdR, was deleted from <i>Pseudomonas aeruginosa</i> PAO1 to make a more promiscuous phage isolation and propagation host. Removal of this endonuclease more than doubled the efficiency of phage propagation on solid media, improved yields from hard-to-propagate phages in liquid bulk-ups and yielded seven times more phages from freshwater samples than wild-type PAO1 - an important step in producing an optimized <i>P. aeruginosa</i> strain for isolating and propagating phages for clinical phage therapy.