Abstract
Filamentous bacteriophage, long and thin filaments that are secreted from the host cells without killing them, have been an antithesis to the standard view of head-and-tail bacterial killing machines. Episomally replicating filamentous phage Ff of Escherichia coli provide the majority of information about the principles and mechanisms of filamentous phage infection, episomal replication and assembly. Chromosomally- integrated "temperate" filamentous phage have complex replication and integration, which are currently under active investigation. The latter are directly or indirectly implicated in diseases caused by bacterial pathogens Vibrio cholerae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Neisseria meningitidis. In the first half of the review, both the Ff and temperate phage are described and compared. A large section of the review is devoted to an overview of phage display technology and its applications in nanotechnology.
Highlights
The archetypal bacteriophage has a head and a tail; it injects its linear double-stranded DNA, blocks the host’s vital processes, replicates and assembles new virions in the cytoplasm, lysing the host cell in order to release the progeny
Filamentous bacteriophage are widespread among Gram-negative bacteria, infecting a wide range of genera including Escherichia, Salmonella, Pseudomonas, Xanthomonas, Vibrio, Thermus and Neisseria (Table 1; Russel and Model, 2006)
In Ff filamentous bacteriophage, some truncated virions are produced, often after about 40 passages of the phage through host cells in the absence of clonal purification, when genomes containing spontaneous duplications of the replication origin tend to appear in the culture (La Farina et al, 1987)
Summary
The archetypal bacteriophage has a head and a tail; it injects its linear double-stranded DNA, blocks the host’s vital processes, replicates and assembles new virions in the cytoplasm, lysing the host cell in order to release the progeny. The replication and gene expression of episomally replicating filamentous phage (e.g. Ff or Pf1), once they infect the host cell, proceeds unabated; their genomes do not encode regulatory proteins.
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