Heteroimmune

Abedon, Stephen T.

doi:10.5281/zenodo.20173633

🔬 Heteroimmune

Characteristic of two temperate phages where a prophage of one type fails to display immunity against a second type.

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

About this entry: Heteroimmune 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

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Heteroimmune: Characteristic of two temperate phages where a prophage of one type fails to display immunity against a second type.

Discussion

<p>Experimentally, heteroimmunity is quite useful since it allows active superinfection of a lysogen by a second temperate phage. Ecologically, the existence of multiple immune types allows (1) polylysogeny to occur, (2) an ability of temperate phages to productively infect some though not all bacterial lysogens, and (3) a vulnerability of lysogens to temperate phages despite their display of immunity.

The glossary to Hershey (1971) defines "homoimmune" in this manner (p. 775): "Two phages are heteroimmune if each is wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity" target="_blank" class="bap-term">sensitive to its own repressor but not, to that of the other."

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References

Hershey (ed.) (1971). The Bacteriophage Lambda. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

How to cite this page

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

[1] Hershey (ed.) (1971). The Bacteriophage Lambda. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

🔬 Heteroimmune

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