๐Ÿ”ฌ Adsorption Efficiency

Likelihood of virion irreversible adsorption given collision between virion and target bacterium.

by Stephen T. Abedon Ph.D. (abedon.1@osu.edu)

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About this entry: Adsorption Efficiency is one of a growing set of phage biology and phage therapy terms defined here. For more phage terms, see Abedon, S.T. (2025). Phage Therapy Annotated Glossary. Preprints.org. 10.20944/preprints202508.0347.v1

phage.org/terms/adsorption_efficiency.html  ·  Abedon’s Books  ·  DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20173633

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Adsorption Efficiency: Likelihood of virion irreversible adsorption given collision between virion and target bacterium.

Discussion

<p>Alternatively, Storms et al. define adsorption efficiency as "The adsorption efficiency is the fraction of phage that adsorbs irreversibly to the host." Their definition and that presented above are equivalent in that the occurrence of phage-bacterial collision is implicit to the Storms et al. definition. The Storms et al. definition is narrower, however, in that it also is implicitly suggestive that the failure to irreversibly adsorb is a relatively long-term property of the virion particle rather than a biology)" target="_blank" class="bap-term">function solely of the dynamics of wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual" target="_blank" class="bap-term">individual phage-host interactions. That is, Storms et al. effectively are rebranding the concept of residual fraction as that phage population defined by one minus adsorption efficiency. nih.gov/pubmed/3401814" class="bap-term" target=_blank>Preissner et al. (1988) appear to use "adsorption efficiency" similarly. It is important to note, however, that when adsorption is measured using end-point determinations, rather than kinetically, then it can be difficult to distinguish between adsorption "inefficiency" as defined prior to this paragraph or instead in terms of a residual fraction. That is, end-point adsorption determinations cannot distinguish between incomplete adsorption that has a occurred due to slow but consistent rates of adsorption versus the existence of two phage populations, one that adsorbs relatively rapidly and one that does not.

Coetzee et al. (1986) by contrast use "adsorption efficiency" perhaps similarly to the concept of capacity, though in terms of phage adsorption to detached pili rather than to whole bacteria.

Note that the literature search employed to generate this entry was not exhaustive and indeed not only were a number of publications in which "adsorption efficiency" was used not cited, due to ambiguity in meaning, but in fact a substantial number of publications using this term were not examined by the author.

External links

How to cite this page

Abedon, S.T. (2026). Phage Terms. https://terms.phage.org  ·  10.5281/zenodo.20173633

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Adsorption Efficiency — terms.phage.orgphage.org — Stephen T. Abedon — Version 2026.05.14