Having recently sequenced several coliphages, we have wanted to compare them to all other coliphages. To do this, we have downloaded all complete (or near complete) bacteriophages genomes [see here]. We then filtered these genomes based on their GenBank description to pull out all phages that have Escherichia, E.coli or coliphage in their description. Having done this we then used an all v all comparison of using MASH, to construct a matrix of similarity. Then visualised this using the heatmaply.
This can be seen below. An interactive webpage of the image is available here
Looking closely at the clusters it is clear to see that phage with genus form discrete clusters eg top right of the plot is T4virus (and other genera in the Tevenvirinae subfamily)