Question

What type of diagnostic method do you think would be most suited to determining if a bacterium causing a human infection was lysogenized by a bacteriophage that contains a virulence gene?

Answer 1

Ans :

Phage Typing can be used as a diagnostic tool to determining if a bacterium causing a human infection was lysogenized by a bacteriophage that contains a virulence gene.

Explanation : Lysogeny is a specific type of inactive viral infection in which the phage genome replicates as a prophage in the bacterial cell. In most lysogenic bacteria the genes required for lytic phage development are not expressed. Also, the lysogenic cells are immune to superinfection by the virus. Phage typing is the testing of strains of a particular bacterial species for susceptibility to specific bacteriophages. Phage typing exploits differential susceptibility of bacteria to various bacteriophages to enable the determination of bacterial genus and species.The patterns of susceptibility provided by phage typing provide information about the possible relatedness of individual clinical isolates. Such information is useful for epidemiological studies and examination.