Bacteriophage enzyme assays

Lysozyme is an enzyme that hydrolyzes some bacterial cell-walls, the bacterium used for the assay being Micrococcus lysodeikticus. Lysozyme is found in a wide variety of species and locations, including bacteriophages, blood, egg white, gastric secretions, milk, nasal mucus, papaya, sputum, and tears. The outstanding achievement in this field has been the elucidation of the crystal structures of some of the lysozyme-substrate complexes. 

Figure 6. Amplification of RNA molecules by assays that are sequence- insensitive. The first assay (upper part) combines the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) of DNA templates with reverse transcription and transcription. Commonly used enzymes are TAQ-polym-erase, HIV reverse transcriptase and bacteriophage T7 RNA polymerase. The assay requires a temperature program applying higher temperatures for double strand dissociation. The second assay (lower part) shows the self-sustained sequence replication reaction (3SR) which can be carried out isothermally because double strand dissociation is replaced by enzymatic digestion of the RNA strand in the RNA-DNA duplex. The enzymes used are HIV reverse transcriptase, RNase H and T7 RNA polymerase.

Thompson NE, Pattee PA (1977) Transformation in Staphylococcus aureus role of bacteriophage and incidence of competence among strains. J Bacteriol 129 778-788 Thompson NE, Razdan M, Kuntsmann G, Aschenbach JM, Evenson ML, BergdoU MS (1986) Detection of staphylococcal enterotoxins by enzyme-Unked immunosorbent assays and radioimmunoassays comparison of monoclonal and polyclonal antibody systems. Appl Environ Microbiol 51 885-890... 

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