Morphogenesis of bacteriophage T4 in extracts of mutant-infected cells

Abstract

The complex structure of bacteriophage T4 includes a variety of proteins which become assembled into mature particles during intracellular development of the virus. Some insight into the genetic control of this process has been provided by physiological studies with conditional lethal mutants, which show that over 40 phage genes are involved in T4 morphogenesis (Fig. 1). However, the mechanisms by which components are assembled have remained obscure, due in part to the lack of a suitable system for their study. In the experiments reported below, conditional lethal mutants of strain T4D have been exploited to develop an in vitro system in which several of the steps in phage morphogenesis can be demonstrated.

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