Our latest on phage-plasmids(PP) is out! Two main findings. PP recombine more with (other) plasmids and phages than the latter, thereby connecting them. PP can become just phages or plasmids, which may then transition to be conjugative. All the world’s an MGE! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Hmm... Yeah I think I have also heard of someone making a glycerol stock of free phages but dont have first hand experience in it. In the previous lab I was in, we would have the phage infect their host and place it in -80 with glycerol just before they burst at least.
The other paper: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37867962/
Although membrane-containing dsDNA bacterial viruses are some of the most prevalent predators in aquatic environments, we know little about how they function due to their intractability in the laborat...
I was taught the same but at least two recent publications show how filters can contribute to a substantial drop in titre and how an environmental membrane containing phage was extremely fragile and so required special storage solutions. www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/15...
Studies into the viral fraction of complex microbial communities, like in the mammalian gut, have recently garnered much interest. Yet there is still no standardized protocol for extracting viruses fr...