Are there any surface structures or components on bacteria that are NOT used as receptors by some phage?
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I definitely agree with Ami. If there is something that isn't used currently as a receptor, I'm sure there will be some viral adaptation to it sooner rather than later. Not sure I agree with Curt's idea that an essential component-turned-receptor would be the death knell for the virus, though. Odds are that a bacterium would have several copies of that protein present just for the redundancy, and if the phage was temperate and not something that automatically induced a lytic cycle upon entering the cell it's possible that the bacterium would keep the phage surviving longer (especially if the phage encoded something useful).
Posted by: Anonmicrobe | December 17, 2011 at 09:55 AM