A capsid is the protein shell of a virus. It consists of several oligomeric structural subunits made of protein called protomers. The observable 3-dimensional morphological subunits, which may or may not correspond to individual proteins, are called capsomeres. The capsid encloses the genetic material of the virus.
Phage therapy or viral phage therapy is the therapeutic use of bacteriophages to treat pathogenic bacterial infections. Phage therapy has many potential applications in human medicine as well as dentistry, veterinary science, and agriculture. If the target host of a phage therapy treatment is not an animal, the term "biocontrol" is usually employed, rather than "phage therapy".
A phagemid or phasmid is a DNA-based cloning vector, which has both bacteriophage and plasmid properties. These vectors carry, in addition to the origin of plasmid replication, an origin of replication derived from bacteriophage. Unlike commonly used plasmids, phagemid vectors differ by having the ability to be packaged into the capsid of a bacteriophage, due to their having a genetic sequence that signals for packaging. Phagemids are used in a variety of biotechnology applications; for example, they can be used in a molecular biology technique called "Phage Display".
A viral plaque is a visible structure formed within a cell culture, such as bacterial cultures within some nutrient medium. The bacteriophage viruses replicate and spread, thus generating regions of cell destructions known as plaques.
Phage display is a laboratory technique for the study of protein–protein, protein–peptide, and protein–DNA interactions that uses bacteriophages to connect proteins with the genetic information that encodes them. In this technique, a gene encoding a protein of interest is inserted into a phage coat protein gene, causing the phage to "display" the protein on its outside while containing the gene for the protein on its inside, resulting in a connection between genotype and phenotype. These displaying phages can then be screened against other proteins, peptides or DNA sequences, in order to detect interaction between the displayed protein and those other molecules. In this way, large libraries of proteins can be screened and amplified in a process called in vitro selection, which is analogous to natural selection.
The Caudovirales are an order of viruses also known as the tailed bacteriophages. Under the Baltimore classification scheme, the Caudovirales are group I viruses as they have double stranded DNA (dsDNA) genomes, which can be anywhere from 18,000 base pairs to 500,000 base pairs in length. The virus particles have a distinct shape; each virion has an icosahedral head that contains the viral genome, and is attached to a flexible tail by a connector protein. The order encompasses a wide range of viruses, many containing genes of similar nucleotide sequence and function. However, some tailed bacteriophage genomes can vary quite significantly in nucleotide sequence, even among the same genus. Due to their characteristic structure and possession of potentially homologous genes, it is believed these bacteriophages possess a common origin.
A filamentous bacteriophage is a type of bacteriophage, or virus of bacteria, defined by its filament-like or rod-like shape. Filamentous phages usually contain a genome of single-stranded DNA and infect Gram-negative bacteria.
Phage is the shortened form of bacteriophage, a virus that infects bacteria.
Marine bacteriophages or marine phages are viruses that live as obligate parasitic agents in marine bacteria such as cyanobacteria. Their existence was discovered through electron microscopy and epifluorescence microscopy of ecological water samples, and later through metagenomic sampling of uncultured viral samples. Marine phages, although microscopic and essentially unnoticed by scientists until recently, appear to be the most abundant and diverse form of DNA replicating agent on the planet. There are approximately 4x1030 phage in oceans or 5x107 per millilitre. Quantification of marine viruses was originally performed using transmission electron microscopy but has been replaced by epifluorescence or flow cytometry.
Biopanning is an affinity selection technique which selects for peptides that bind to a given target. All peptide sequences obtained from biopanning using combinatorial peptide libraries have been stored in a special freely available database named BDB. This technique is often used for the selection of antibodies too.
Biopreservation is the use of natural or controlled microbiota or antimicrobials as a way of preserving food and extending its shelf life. The biopreservation of food, especially utilizing lactic acid bacteria (LAB) that are inhibitory to food spoilage microbes, has been practiced since early ages, at first unconsciously but eventually with an increasingly robust scientific foundation. Beneficial bacteria or the fermentation products produced by these bacteria are used in biopreservation to control spoilage and render pathogens inactive in food. There are a various modes of action through which microorganisms can interfere with the growth of others such as organic acid production, resulting in a reduction of pH and the antimicrobial activity of the un-dissociated acid molecules, a wide variety of small inhibitory molecules including hydrogen peroxide, etc. It is a benign ecological approach which is gaining increasing attention.
Shah Mohammad Faruque is a professor in the School of Life Sciences at Independent University Bangladesh (IUB). He is widely recognized for his research in Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium which causes the epidemic diarrhoeal disease Cholera. Among other positions, previously he was a professor at BRAC University; director of the Genomics Centre at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B), and formerly director of the Centre for Food and Water Borne Diseases in ICDDR,B. His areas of interest include microbial genomics, bacteriophages, environmental microbiology, ecology, and evolution of bacterial pathogens, particularly those associated with waterborne and foodborne diseases. Faruque is well known for his work on molecular genetics, epidemiology and ecology of the cholera pathogen, and its bacteriophages.
Bacteriophage f1 is structurally classified as a class I filamentous phage, and is closely related to the other Ff phages, such as M13 and phage fd.
The CTXφ bacteriophage is a filamentous bacteriophage that contains the genetic material needed by the Vibrio cholerae bacterium for the production of cholera toxin, or CT. CTXφ is a positive virus with single-stranded DNA (ssDNA).
In molecular biology, a phage major coat protein is an alpha-helical protein that forms a viral envelope of filamentous bacteriophages. These bacteriophages are flexible rods, about one to two micrometres long and six nm in diameter, with a helical shell of protein subunits surrounding a DNA core. The approximately 50-residue subunit of the major coat protein is largely alpha-helix, and the axis of the alpha-helix makes a small angle with the axis of the virion. The protein shell can be considered in three sections: the outer surface, occupied by the N-terminal region of the subunit and rich in acidic residues that give the virion a low isoelectric point; the interior of the shell where protein subunits interact, mainly with each other; and the inner surface, rich in positively charged residues that interact with the DNA core.
Filamentous bacteriophage fd is a type of filamentous bacteriophage known to infect Escherichia coli. It shares many structural and genomic similarities with Enterobacteria phage M13.
Cyanophage N-1 is a myovirus bacteriophage that infects freshwater filamentous cyanobacteria of the Nostoc genus. The virus was first isolated by Kenneth Adolph and Robert Haselkorn in 1971 in the USA, from the nitrogen-fixing cyanobacterium, Nostoc muscorum. N-1 is closely related to cyanophage A-1, but only distantly to other cyanophages of freshwater or marine origin.
George Pearson Smith is an American biologist and Nobel laureate. He is a Curators' Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, US.
Sulfolobus islandicus filamentous virus is a species of Bacteriophage in the order Ligamenvirales. It's only known host is the Archaea Sulfolobus islandicus.
