Studies on lysogenesis

Abstract

The stable association of a bacteriophage with a bacterial strain, known as lysogenesis, has received scarce attention in the last ten years, especially by comparison with the remarkable progress made during the same period in the study of common bacteriophage infection followed by lysis of the infected cell (see a summary in Benzer et al., 1950). Only recently Lwoff and coworkers (1950 a,b), working with Bacillus megatherium, have succeeded in defining more precisely the lysogenic condition. In this paper we report observations on a lysogenic strain of Escherichia coli that carries more than one detectable type of phage.