Author Spotlight: An Adapted Optical Density-Based Microplate Assay for Characterizing Actinobacteriophage Infection

Ultimately, we're interested in bacteriophage-host interactions. This protocol enables the measurement of phage infection in slow-growing bacteria, generating descriptive infection metrics. This methodology is instrumental in studying bacteriophage-host coevolution in slow-growing Actinomycete bacteria.

Rapid microplate methods give excellent results for fast-growing bacterial hosts, but are too brief to showcase bacteria-phage infection progression in slower growing bacterial hosts, such as actinomycetes. Our method is adapted for slow-growing bacteria, allowing bacteria and phage to be co-cultured for the multiple days required to characterize the bacteriophage infection dynamics. Our protocol allows bacteriophage-host interactions to be assessed for slow-growing bacteria in microplates rather than requiring sub-sampling from a larger culture flask.

This protocol uses readily available materials to adapt for extended culture times and allows multiple replicates to be plated in a single microplate.