Bacteriophage T4 and its relatives

Excerpt

In the coming months Virology Journal will publish a number of authoritative reviews about the biochemistry, structural biology and genomics of the bacteriophage T4 and the T4-related phages. Phage T4 is one of the most extensively investigated viruses and has been the central focus of several monographs and reviews over the last 25 years. Its popularity among experimental biologists is related to the ease with which this phage and some of its relatives can be propagated in widely available nonpathogenic laboratory strains of Escherichia coli and the diversity of experimental approaches that can be used to analyze its DNA genome and the RNA and protein products it encodes. The T4 biological system is amenable to investigation by genetic, phylogenetic, biochemical, biophysical, structural, computational and other tools. …