Identifying the assembly pathway of cyanophage inside the marine bacterium using electron cryo-tomography

Authors:

Wei Dai1, Michael F. Schmid1, Jonathan A. King2, Wah Chiu1,*
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Affiliations:

1 National Center for Macromolecular Imaging, Verna and Marrs Mclean Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX 77030 USA

2 Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA

Keywords: 

electron cryo-tomography; Zernike phase optics; marine cyanobacterium; phage assembly intermediates; transient biological processes; 3-D structures.

Related Article(s)? 

Dai W, Fu C, Raytcheva D, Flanagan J, Khant HA, Liu X, Rochat RH, Haase-Pettingell C, Piret J, Ludtke SJ, Nagayama K, Schmid MF, King JA, Chiu W (2013). Visualizing virus assembly intermediates inside marine cyanobacteria. Nature 502(7473):707-10. , 10.1038/nature12604

Corresponding Author(s):

Dr. Wah Chiu, National Center for Macromolecular Imaging, Verna and Marrs Mclean Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX 77030 USA wah@bcm.edu

Conflict of interest statement:

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Please cite this article as:

Wei Dai, Michael F. Schmid, Jonathan A. King Wah Chiu (2014). Identifying the assembly pathway of cyanophage inside the marine bacterium using electron cryo-tomography. Microbial Cell 1(1): 45-47.

© Dai et al. This is an open-access article released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NonDerivative 3.0 license, which allows readers to download the article and share it with others, provided that the original authors and source are acknowledged. The article cannot be changed in any way or used commercially.

Abstract:

Advances in electron cryo-tomography open up a new avenue to visualize the 3-D internal structure of a single bacterium before and after its infection by bacteriophages in its native environment, without using chemical fixatives, fluorescent dyes or negative stains. Such direct observation reveals the presence of assembly intermediates of the bacteriophage and thus allows us to map out the maturation pathway of the bacteriophage inside its host.

doi: 10.15698/mic2014.01.125
Volume 1, pp. 45 to 47, published 06/01/2014.

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