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Appl Environ Microbiol, February 1998, p. 535-542, Vol. 64, No. 2
Department of Marine Science, University of
South Florida, St. Petersburg, Florida 33701
Received 24 April 1997/Accepted 14 November 1997
To understand the ecological and genetic role of viruses in the
marine environment, it is critical to know the infectivity of viruses
and the types of interactions that occur between marine viruses and
their hosts. We isolated four marine phages from turbid plaques by
using four indigenous bacterial hosts obtained from concentrated water
samples from Mamala Bay, Oahu, Hawaii. Two of the rod-shaped bacterial
hosts were identified as Sphingomonas paucimobilis and
Flavobacterium sp. All of 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 sizes ranged from 7.8 to 240 phage/bacterial cell, and the genome
sizes, as determined by restriction digestion, ranged from 36 to 112 kb. The members of the Siphoviridae, T-
0099-2240/98/$04.00+0
Copyright © 1998, American Society for Microbiology. All rights reserved.
Characterization of Marine Temperate Phage-Host
Systems Isolated from Mamala Bay, Oahu, Hawaii

HSIC, and
T-
D0, and the member of the Myoviridae, T-
D1B, were
found to form lysogenic associations with their bacterial hosts, which
were isolated from the same water samples. Hybridization of phage
T-
HSIC probe with lysogenic host genomic DNA was observed in dot
blot hybridization experiments, indicating that prophage T-
HSIC was
integrated within the host genome. These phage-host systems are
available for use in studies of marine lysogeny and transduction.
*
Corresponding author. Mailing address: Department of
Marine Science, University of South Florida, 140 7th Avenue South, St. Petersburg, FL 33701. Phone: (813) 553-1130. Fax: (813) 553-1189. E-mail: jpaul{at}seas.marine.usf.edu.
Present address: The Center of Marine Biotechnology, University of
Maryland Biotechnology Institute, Baltimore, MD 21202.
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