Bacteriophage assembly

Hendrix, R. W. (1979). Purification and properties of groE, a host protein involved in bacteriophage assembly./. Mol. Biol. 129, 375-392. 

U. K. Laemmli, Cleavage of stmctural proteins during the assembly of the head of bacteriophage T4, Nature, 227, 680 (1970). 

The basic problem of virus replication can be simply put the virus must somehow induce a living host cell to synthesize all of the essential components needed to make more virus particles. These components must then be assembled into the proper structure and the new virus particles must escape from the cell and infect other cells. The various phases of this replication process in a bacteriophage can be categorized in seven steps ... 

Ishmael, F.T., Alley, S.C., and Benkovic, S.J. (2002) Assembly of the bacteriophage T4 helicase-architec-ture and stoichiometry of the gp41-gp59 complex./. Biol. Chem. 277, 20555-20562. 

Kikuchi, Y., and King,J. (1975). Genetic control of bacteriophage T4 baseplate morphogenesis. III. Formation of the central plug and overall assembly pathway./. Mol. Biol. 99, 695-716. 

Ward, S., and Dickson, R. C. (1971). Assembly of bacteriophage T4 tail fibers. 3. Genetic control of the major tail fiber polypeptides. J. Mol. Biol. 62, 479-492. 

Abresda, N. G., et al. (2004). Insights into assembly from structural analysis of bacteriophage PRDl. Nature 432, 68-74. 

Smith, H. O., Hutchison, C. A. Ill, Pfannkoch, C., and Venter, J. C. (2003). Generating a synthetic genome by whole genome assembly phiX174 bacteriophage from synthetic oligonucleotides. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA, 100, 15440-5. 

Viruses have many modes of life. They enter cells in various ways. Some enter through coated pits from which they are taken into lysosomes via endocytosis. Others are literally injected into the cells (See Box 7-C). Within cells some viruses are assembled in the nucleus, some in the cytoplasm, and some in membranes. The typical life cycle of a virus leads to rapid formation of large numbers of progeny. Within 20 minutes after entrance into a bacterial cell, a bacteriophage can... 

Many other oligomeric enzymes and other complex assemblies of more than one kind of protein subunit are known. For example, the 2-oxoacid dehydrogenases are huge 2000- to 4000-kDa complexes containing three different proteins with different enzymatic activities in a cubic array (Fig. 15-14). The filaments of striated muscle (Chapter 19), antibodies and complement of blood (Chapter 31), and the tailed bacteriophages (Box 7-C ) all have complex molecular architectures. 

While it is easy to visualize the assembly of oligomeric proteins, it is not as easy to imagine how complex objects such as eukaryotic cilia (Fig. 1-8) or the sarcomeres of muscle (Fig. 19-6) are formed. However, study of the assembly of bacteriophage particles and other small biological objects has led to the concepts of self-assembly and assembly pathways, concepts that are now applied to every aspect of the architecture of cells. 

Figure 7-29 Assembly sequence for bacteriophage T4 with details for the tail. The numbers refer to the genes in the T4 chromosome map (Fig. 26-2). A "P" after the number indicates that the protein gene product is incorporated into the phage tail. Other numbers indicate gene products that are thought to have essential catalytic functions in the assembly process. Adapted from King and Mykolajewycz236 and Kikuchi and King.214...

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