Survey of environmental bacteriophages

A series of biological isolation methods are applied to isolate bacteriophages that are unusually large, or unusually hard to grow.

A sequence survey is conducted to identify isolates that have an unusual content of genes.

2nd of a kind, from table 2, Serwer et al., 2004.

1st of its kind: from table 2 Serwer et al., 2004.

phageD - EM.

Note: Myovirus morphology. At left of the image are two phage particles, the top one oriented with tail down, and the one at the bottom oriented with tail up. In both cases the contractile tail has contracted exposing ~ 100 nm of tail tip fiber. On the bottom particle, note the well imaged base plate assembly at the bottom of the tail sheath. Tail fibers (not visualized) are usually connected to the base plate. The relatively consistent morphology of myovirus tails suggests extensive homology in the proteins composing the tail, yet sorting out the components by sequence homology is still often difficult.