Marine T4-type bacteriophages, a ubiquitous component of the dark matter of the biosphere.

ABSTRACT: Tailed bacteriophages are the most abundant biological entities in marine environments. However, most of these marine phages are uncharacterized because few of their hosts have been cultivated. To learn more about such phages, we designed a set of degenerate PCR primers for phage T4 g23, which encodes the major capsid protein in all of the T4-type phages, an important family of the tailed phage. These primers were used to amplify g23-related sequences from diverse marine environments (fjords and bays of British Columbia, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and the western Arctic Ocean) revealing a remarkable level of molecular diversity, which in some cases was correlated with morphological variation of the virions. Phylogenetic analysis showed that although some of these sequences were closely re

SUBMITTER: Filee J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1194919 | biostudies-literature | 2005 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature