The genetics of the Luria-Latarjet effect in bacteriophage T4: evidence for the involvement of multiple DNA repair pathways.

Abstract

The Luria-Latarjet effect is an increase in resistance of a virus to DNA damage during infection of a host. It has often been assumed to involve recombinational repair, but this has never been demonstrated experimentally. Using nine bacteriophage (phage) T4 mutants, I present evidence indicating that, for phage T4, the Luria-Latarjet effect is due to three repair pathways-excision repair, post-replication-recombinational-repair (PRRR) and multiplicity reactivation (MR) (a second form of recombinational repair). The results also show that the Luria-Latarjet effect develops in two stages. The first stage starts soon after infection. Damage which occurs during the first stage can be repaired by excision repair or PRRR. The second stage appears to start after the first round of DNA replication is complete. DNA damage which occurs during this stage can apparently be repaired by MR as well as the other two repair pathways. The results of this study support the hypothesis that recombinational repair has been selected to ensure that the progeny phage genomes which are packaged have minimum DNA damage. Since other viruses which infect bacterial, animal and plant cells show a Luria-Latarjet effect similar to that in phage T4, the conclusions from this study may have wide applicability.