Abortive infection mechanisms

O Connor, L., Coffey, A., Daly, C., and Fitzgerald, G.F. (1996). AbiG, a genotypically novel abortive infection mechanism encoded by plasmid pCI750 of Lactococcus lactis subsp. cremoris UC653. Appl Environ Microbiol 62 3075-3082. 

L. lactis and Strep, thermophilus are the most extensively used LAB species in dairy fermentative processes, thus several phages infecting them have been isolated and characterized in detail (Sudrez et al. 2002 Emond and Moineau 2007, Quiberoni et al. 2010). The extended co-survival of LAB and phages within the same environment has prompted the acquisition of a variety of native bacteriophage defense systems. These mechanisms include inhibition of phage adsorption, blocking of DNA injection, restriction/modification systems, abortive infection (Moineau and Levesque 2005), and the novel clustered interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) systems. 

The initial observations by Enders (1954) and his collaborators that virus-cell interaction culminates in the destruction of the infected cells in culture made it possible to study these alterations at both the morphological and biochemical levels. Highly cytocidal viruses, during the process of either productive or abortive virus replication, ultimately kill the cell. Notable examples of this type of viruses are the picornaviruses, the rhabdoviruses, the herpesviruses, and the poxviruses. Early studies of virus cytopathology were mainly descriptive in nature, documenting the various types of virus-induced morphological alterations to cells. With the advent of new biochemical techniques, it became possible to scrutinize the mechanisms by which these viruses altered the infected cells. The main objective of these studies has been to define the initial step of virus-induced alteration... 

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