ArticleCurrent biology : CB2012
A single-molecule Hershey-Chase experiment.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed.
- Rage against the mean: a perspective on measuring fitness of individual phage particles.Npj viruses · 2026Review
- A synthetic cell phage cycle.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Synthetic and Functional Engineering of Bacteriophages: Approaches for Tailored Bactericidal, Diagnostic, and Delivery Platforms.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Evaluating phage lytic activity: from plaque assays to single-cell technologies.Frontiers in microbiology · 2025Review
- Microscopic phage adsorption assay: High-throughput quantification of virus particle attachment to host bacterial cells.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Coinfecting phages impede each other's entry into the cell.Current biology : CB · 2024Article
- Role of DNA-DNA sliding friction and nonequilibrium dynamics in viral genome ejection and packaging.Nucleic acids research · 2023Article
- AT-specific DNA visualization revisits the directionality of bacteriophage λ DNA ejection.Nucleic acids research · 2023Article
- Mycobacterial nucleoid-associated protein Lsr2 is required for productive mycobacteriophage infection.Nature microbiology · 2023Article
- Imaging the Infection Cycle of T7 at the Single Virion Level.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Article
- Tail proteins of phage SU10 reorganize into the nozzle for genome delivery.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Viral tag and grow: a scalable approach to capture and characterize infectious virus-host pairs.ISME communications · 2022Article
- Prophages encode phage-defense systems with cognate self-immunity.Cell host & microbe · 2021Article
- Bacterial Vivisection: How Fluorescence-Based Imaging Techniques Shed a Light on the Inner Workings of Bacteria.Microbiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR · 2020Review
- Single-particle virology.Biophysical reviews · 2020Review
- Article
- Pressure-driven release of viral genome into a host nucleus is a mechanism leading to herpes infection.eLife · 2019Article
- Time-resolved DNA release from an O-antigen-specificThe Journal of biological chemistry · 2019Article
- High-resolution studies of lysis-lysogeny decision-making in bacteriophage lambda.The Journal of biological chemistry · 2019Review
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Ever since Hershey and Chase used phages to establish DNA as the carrier of genetic information in 1952, the precise mechanisms of phage DNA translocation have been a mystery. Although bulk measurements have set a timescale for in vivo DNA translocation during bacteriophage infection, measurements of DNA ejection by single bacteriophages have only been made in vitro. Here, we present direct visualization of single bacteriophages infecting individual Escherichia coli cells. For bacteriophage λ, we establish a mean ejection time of roughly 5 min with significant cell-to-cell variability, including pausing events. In contrast, corresponding in vitro single-molecule ejections are more uniform and finish within 10 s. Our data reveal that when plotted against the amount of DNA ejected, the velocity of ejection for two different genome lengths collapses onto a single curve. This suggests that in vivo ejections are controlled by the amount of DNA ejected. In contrast, in vitro DNA ejections are governed by the amount of DNA left inside the capsid. This analysis provides evidence against a purely intrastrand repulsion-based mechanism and suggests that cell-internal processes dominate. This provides a picture of the early stages of phage infection and sheds light on the problem of polymer translocation.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.