The article is an overview of phage titers encountered in the biosphere, …

• Introduction
• Numbers: phage titers in the biosphere
• Cycles: dynamic phage-host relationships
• Complexity: phage genomics
• Nutrition: infecting the starved cell
• Polyvalency: finding the right cell
• Lysogeny: a survival strategy for both phage and bacteria
• Phage resistance
• The look ahead: integrative biology with phages
• Acknowledgments
• References
• Figures

We thank Anne Constable for reading the review and Barry Dowsett (Salisbury, United Kingdom) for electron microscopy of the Staphylococcus phage.

We thank the Swiss National Science Foundation for the support of Sandra Chibani-Chennoufi (grant 5002-057832).

Footnotes

* Corresponding author. Mailing address: Nestlé Research Centre, Vers-chez-les-Blanc, CH-1000 Lausanne 26, Switzerland. Phone: 0041 21 785 8676. Fax: 0041 21 785 8544. E-mail: [email protected] .