Generation of transducing particles in Staphylococcus aureus

Abstract

Transduction of plasmid pC194 and bacteriophage phi 11de varied inversely with the multiplicity of infection. As the multiplicity of infection decreased from 10(-1) to 10(-5) PFU/CFU, the transduction frequency of pC194 increased 10(4)-fold; the transduction frequency of phi 11de increased 300-fold with a 100-fold decrease in multiplicity of infection. Physical and genetic analysis of the transduced DNA showed that pC194 resided in the phage particle as a random, circularly permuted linear concatemer. In DNA prepared from phage that cotransduced pC194 and phi 11de, pC194 resided in the transducing phage primarily as a linear multimer of 15.8 kilobases, or about 5.4 pC194 monomers. The pC194 multimer was randomly inserted into the phi 11 genome.