The Life Cycle of T4 - Part 1

The Life Cycle of T4 - Part 1
(and of most "T-Evens")

Take me forward to Part 2.....or to some Phage Lab Experiments

  1. The Mechanics of Doing a T4 Infection

    1. Culture Medium

    2. Status of the Host Cells

    3. Adding the Phage

      1. Multiplicity of Infection (moi, "m")

      2. Poisson Distribution
        (see "Elephant Riddles")

      3. Venn Diagrams

        ....

        1. Wiskers: retainers for "docking" the fibers "in flight"

        2. Tryptophan: triggers the deployment of the fibers

        3. Damage tolerance to fibers: zero (consider the implications of antibody minimum lethal dosage)

        4. Specificity and The Attachment Site

      4. Ø-DNA insertion

        1. Function of gp-2 at lead end ("leader protein")

        2. The glycosylation of the Ø-DNA (166 kbp = 1.2 x 108 dal = 300 avg proteins)

          1. Why?

          2. How?

            1. Done only to whole DNA
            2. New Enzymes needed

        3. Circularly permuted, linear entrance (2-4% terminal redundancy)

          1. Sticky ends: 3'-exonuclease
          2. Circularization; ligase

        4. ori-Ø is at gene-42; bidirectional; intermediate

        5. Concatomer formation in intermediate and late phases

          1. Rolling circle mode of replication

          2. Packing head-fulls (which are slightly more than one genome's worth)

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