Sc. Jiang et al., CHARACTERIZATION OF MARINE TEMPERATE PHAGE-HOST SYSTEMS ISOLATED FROMMAMALA BAY, OAHU, HAWAII, Applied and environmental microbiology, 64(2), 1998, pp. 535-542
To understand the ecological and genetic role of viruses in the marine
environment, it is critical to know the infectivity of viruses and th
e types of interactions that occur between marine viruses and their ho
sts, We isolated four marine phages from turbid plaques by using four
indigenous bacterial hosts obtained from concentrated water samples fr
om Mamala Bay, Oahu, Hawaii, Two of the rod-shaped bacterial hosts wer
e identified as Sphingomonas paucimobilis and Flavobacterium sp. All o
f the phage isolates were tailed phages and contained double-stranded
DNA. Two of the phage isolates had morphologies typical of the family
Siphoviridae, while the other two belonged to the families Myoviridae
and Podoviridae. The head diameters of these viruses ranged from 47 to
70.7 nm, and the tail lengths ranged from 12 to 146 nm, The burst siz
es ranged from 7.8 to 24O phage/bacterial cell, and the genome sizes,
as determined by restriction digestion, ranged from 36 to 112 kb, The
members of the Siphoviridae, T-phi HSIC, and T-phi D0, and the member
of the Myoviridae, T-phi D1B, were found to form lysogenic association
s with their bacterial hosts, which were isolated from the same water
samples, Hybridization of phage T-phi HSIC probe with lysogenic host g
enomic DNA was observed in dot blot hybridization experiments, indicat
ing that prophage T-phi HSIC was integrated within the host genome, Th
ese phage-host systems are available for use in studies of marine lyso
geny and transduction.