Figure 5.

Proposed phage use of filamentous bacteria as a means of speeding up plaque growth. If bacteria are long enough, latent periods short enough, and diffusion (dashed orange arrows) through agar slow enough, then infection of appropriately oriented bacteria could serve as ‘ladders’ (solid yellow arrows) for movement of phages faster or deeper into a bacterial lawn than virions may be able to progress extracellularly by diffusion alone.