Abstract
In a view of growing interest in bacteriophages as the most abundant members of microbial communities and as antibacterial agents, reliable methods for bacteriophage long-term preservation, that warrant the access to original or mutant stocks of unchanged properties, have become of crucial importance. A storage method that retains the infectivity of any kind of bacteriophage virions, either in a cell lysate or in a purified suspension, does not exist, due to the enormous diversity of bacteriophages and hence the differentiation of their sensitivity to various storage conditions. Here, we describe a method of long-term bacteriophage preservation, which is based on freezing of freshly infected susceptible bacteria at early stages of bacteriophage development. The infected bacteria release mature bacteriophages upon melting enabling the recovery of bacteriophage virions with high efficiency. The only limitation of this method is the sensitivity of bacteriophage host to deep-freezing, and thus it can be used for the long-term preservation of the vast majority of bacteriophages.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by funds from the Operational Program “Innovative Economy, 2007–2013,” project No. POIG 01.03.01-02-003/08, and statutory funds for the Faculty of Agriculture and Biology of the Warsaw University of Life Sciences, SGGW.
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Łobocka, M.B., Głowacka, A., Golec, P. (2018). Methods for Bacteriophage Preservation. In: Azeredo, J., Sillankorva, S. (eds) Bacteriophage Therapy. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1693. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7395-8_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7395-8_17
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