Phage

(Electron micrograph of phage SP6 courtesy of Ian Molineaux)

• What are phage (link to ASM site)

• Why study phage?
  • Some important biological lessons learned from studying phage
  • Phage therapy: use of phage as antibiotics

• Lytic growth
  • Stages of infection
  • Attachment
  • Formation of plaques
  • Multiplicity of infection (MOI)
  • Lytic life cycle
  • Video clip showing bacterial lysis by phage
  • Phage replication (link to Martin Mulligan's website)
  • Phage P22 packaging
  • Lambda vs P22 replication and packaging
  • Host lysis

• Lysogeny
  • Lambda
  • P22
  • Lysogenic conversion - Lysogenic phage and bacterial virulence

• Specialized transduction
  • Specialized transducing particles
  • An example

• Generalized transduction
  • Packaging of generalized transducing phage
  • Abortive transduction
  • Use of the Wu formula to calculate cotransduction distances

• Phage ecology (for recent reviews see: Weinbauer MG. 2004. Ecology of prokaryotic viruses. FEMS Microbiol Rev. 28(2): 127-181, and Chibani-Chennoufi et al. 2004. Phage-host interaction: an ecological perspective. J. Bacteriol. 186: 3677-3686)

SOME USEFUL PHAGE LINKS:

• Phage P22
• Phage Lambda
• Phage T7
• Phage T4 genetic map
• Phage M13

• Phage nomenclature
• Phage genomics

• Some sample problems about lytic growth of phage.
• Some sample problems about specialized transduction.

• Some sample problems about lysogenic growth of phage.
• Some sample problems about generalized transduction.

Please send comments, suggestions, or questions to smaloy@sciences.sdsu.edu
Last modified July 10, 2004