FIGURE 1.

Life cycle of a bacterial virus. The ejection of the genome into the host cell happens within a minute for phage like λ and T4 (Novick and Baldeschwieler, 1988; Letellier et al., 2004). The eclipse period (time between the viral adsorption and the first appearance of the progeny) can be as short as ∼10–15 min (Endy et al., 1997). The packaging of the genome into a single capsid takes ∼5 min (Smith et al., 2001). Lysis of the bacterial cell is completed in <1 h (Endy et al., 1997).