Family: Herelleviridae

Genus: Hopescreekvirus

Distinguishing features

The genome of Lactobacillus phage LfeInf (originally named vB_LfeM_EcoInf), the exemplar isolate of Hopescreekvirus LfeInf, the only known species of this genus, is 106 071 bp with 123 predicted protein coding sequences (one is repeated in 817 bp-long regions of terminal redundancy) and 2 tRNAs (Liu et al., 2015). The only known member of the genus infects Lactobacillus fermentum.

Species demarcation criteria

There is only one species in the genus. New members of this species will be assigned based on their being more than 95% identical in genome nucleotide sequence, including the terminal repeat region. Phages with genomes that differ by more than 5% will be assigned to different species.