🔬 Coinfection

Discussion

<p>Note that coinfection does not necessarily follow co- or multiple adsorptions of a single bacterium since phages can display superinfection exclusion, which means that later phages are blocked from entering the bacterium's cytoplasm. (I use here the phage genome reaching the adsorbed bacterium's cytoplasm as a working definition of "infected".)

Note also that under most circumstances the burst size of a coinfected bacterium is either the same as that of a singly infected bacterium or declines relative to a singly infected bacterium. The latter can be described as a depressor effect.

Coinfection also can be defined more generally in terms of infection of especially multicellular organisms by more than one type of pathogen.

External links

How to cite this page