The search for ΦX174 – also spelled phi X 174 – was the task that our fellow blogger Sung W. Lim aka naturepoker set himself some time ago. Not by digging in some long-forgotten iced-over box in the back corner of a –80°C freezer. Rather, he searched the literature, to find out when and where this bacteriophage was first described. Naturepoker recorded the result of this sleuthing in a fine blog post.
Why ΦX174, from among all of all phages, you may ask? Well, it is no hyperbole to describe ΦX174 as playing a pivotal role in the development of molecular biology techniques. In 1967, Goulian, Kornberg & Sinsheimer mastered the Enzymatic synthesis of DNA, XXIV. Synthesis of infectious phage phi-X174 DNA. Naturepoker mentions the first sequencing of a full genome in 1977, that of ΦX174 (5386 bp ss-DNA) by Sanger et al. (1977). Note the low NCBI RefSeq accession number: NC_001422.1.
As an appetizer, we share a section of Searching for ΦX174 with you, and we would be pleased if you also enjoyed the entire blog, which you can find here.
(click to enlarge)
July 20th, 1935. Page 1271 by Sertic V. and Boulgakov N. Phi X 174 phage entry is marked with a red dot, left side, first column. Source. Frontispiece: Pasteur-Chamberland water filter from the company’s catalog, Le Pasteur, ca. 1890s. Source
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It was a week or so into the search by the time I arrived at what was extremely likely to be the very first description of the phage phi x 174 in history. Yet even with the solid reference at hand, I wasn’t able to find a digitized version of the particular paper anywhere, let alone a translation. At the time only way to access the paper seemed to be obtaining a hard copy from somewhere (which was the case for the Jacque Monod thesis – we weren’t able to find a digitized version anywhere, so we had to get an interlibrary loan through the New York Public Library system, take cellphone pictures of each of the pages and then translate them into English by hand). Alas, I wasn’t able to find any publicly accessible library system in United States with a hard copy of the Comptes Rendus des seances de Societe Biologie 1935 – and lacking any connections to the academia or someone in France, it looked like the search had come to a standstill with no recourse.
Another week went by while sending out requests to acquaintances and going off on more fruitless searches for either digitally or physically accessible copies of the phi x 174 references. It turns out, as with the reference based searches for specific research papers, human search tend to get us far better results than algorithmic ones, especially if the topic of the search veers off the beaten path. A friend of my friend, Cory Tobin soon got in touch and let us know about a rather wonderful resource called Gallica (https://gallica.bnf.fr/) - a freely accessible digital library service of the Bibliotheque nationale de France, which indexes an impressive array of printed materials, including academic publications going back hundreds of years.
From there on it was a relatively trivial matter to find the correct volume and article – page 1270 from July 20th 1935 Report on meetings of the Society of Biology. Classification and identification of typhi-phage (as in, Salmonella typhi). The specific diagram containing what is likely the very first naming and characterization of the...
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