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When Viruses Infect Bacteria: Looking in Vivo at Virus-Bacterium Associations

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Viruses are the most abundant parasites on Earth. Well known viruses, such as the flu virus, attack human hosts, while viruses such as the tobacco mosaic virus infect plant hosts.

More common, but less understood, are cases of viruses infecting bacteria known as bacteriophages, or phages. In part, this is due to the difficulty of culturing bacteria and viruses that have been cut off from their usual biological surroundings in a process called in vitro.

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, were the first to use a clever technique to look at virus-bacterium interactions in vivo, that is, within an organism's normal state. The researchers report their results in the July 1st issue of the journal Science.

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