A widespread family of phage-inducible chromosomal islands only steals bacteriophage tails to spread in nature

We report the first demonstration that a family of phage-inducible chromosomal island (PICIs), a type of satellites, encodes all the proteins required for both the production of the small-sized capsids and the exclusive packaging of the PICIs into these capsids. Therefore, this new family, that we have named cf-PICIs (capsid forming PICIs), only requires phage tails to generate infective PICI particles.