Ff phages

Methods that use the interaction between the phage and the pilus of the bacterium to mediate the selection process have been developed by several academic groups [16, 57, 58], and are reviewed in [17]. The method is based on the principles that infection by Ff phage requires a complete pill protein. If part of pill is removed, phage are noninfective. However, infectivity can be... 

A group of the most commonly used phages are the collectively called Ff phages (Ml3, fd, fl), because of their filamentous structure and almost total dependence on the F-pilus to infect their Escherichia coli host (Russel et al., 1988). Unlike the lytic phage that causes cell lysis when released from the host, Ff phage does... 

Fig. 15.2 Schematic diagram showing the structure of the filamentous phage and its different modes of display. (A) Filamentous phages are rod-hke viruses with a circular ssDNA genome of about 6.4kb. The tube-hke capsid is composed of several thousand copies (up to 2700) of tightly packed major coat protein pVin, capped by five copies of pill and pVI on one end and five copies of pVn and pIX on the opposite end. (B) Phage display hbraries can be displayed on the surface of the Ff phage by fusion to the different capsid proteins.

Filamentous bacteriophages. Bacteriophages of the Ff family include the fd, fl, and M13 strains.313,32-36 Phage Ml 3 is widely used in cloning genes and for many other purposes (Chapter 26). The genome is a circular, single-stranded DNA of 6400 nucleotides... 

Although a number of different phage (mid) antibody libraries have been published (see Table 18.1), the number which are naive is relatively small. To date, all phage antibody libraries have been made on the filamentous phage, Ff (which comprises fd, fl, and Ml3). In the creation of such libraries a number of different choices can be made ... 

---