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Lysogeny
Many bacterial and animal viruses lie dormant in the infected cell, and their DNA may be integrated into the DNA of the host cell chromosome. The integrated viral DNA replicates as the cell genome replicates; after cell division, the integrated viral DNA is duplicated and usually distributed equally to the two cells that result. The bacteria that carry the noninfective precursor phage, called the prophage, remain healthy and continue to grow until they are stimulated by some perturbing factor, such as ultraviolet light. The prophage DNA is then excised from the bacterial chromosome, and the phage replicates, producing many progeny phages and lysing the host bacterial cell. This process, originally discovered in temperate bacteriophages in 1950 by the French microbiologist André Lwoff, is called lysogeny.
The classic example of a temperate bacteriophage is called lambda (λ) virus, which readily causes lysogeny in certain species of the bacterium Escherichia coli. The DNA of the λ bacteriophage is integrated into the DNA of the E. coli host chromosome at specific regions called attachment sites. The integrated prophage is the inherited, noninfectious form of the virus; it contains a gene that represses the lytic functions of the phage and thus ensures that the host cell will continue to replicate the phage DNA along with its own and that it will not be destroyed by the virus. Ultraviolet light, or other factors that stimulate the replication of DNA in the host cell, causes the formation of a recA protease, an enzyme that breaks apart the λ phage repressor and induces λ phage replication and, eventually, destruction of the host cell.
Excision of the prophage DNA from the host chromosomal DNA (as an initial step in the synthesis of an infective, lytic virus) sometimes results in the removal of some of the host cell DNA, which is packaged into defective bacteriophages; part of the bacteriophage DNA is removed and replaced at the other end by a gene of the host bacterium. Such a virus particle is called a transducing phage because, when it infects a bacterial cell, it can transmit the gene captured by λ phage DNA into the next bacterial cell it infects. Transduction by bacteriophages is an efficient means for transferring the genetic information of one bacterial cell to another.
This means of transferring genetic information, called lysogenic conversion, imparts genes with special functions to bacterial cells without such functions. It is common in bacteria and is an important aspect of the epidemiology (incidence, distribution, and control) of infectious diseases. For example, the bacterium Corynebacterium diphtheriae is the causative agent of diphtheria, but only when it contains the prophage of bacteriophage β, which codes for the toxin that is responsible for the disease.