Draft 4/8

Bacteriophages might be one of the coolest things in all of the natural world. They are viruses that infect bacteria. Bacteriophages are the pictures you see that look like an alien spaceship landing on a cell surface. They send their DNA into the bacterial cell. They can go through 2 separate life cycles, lytic and lysogenic. The lysogenic life cycle of the bacteriophage is for replicating DNA as fast as possible within the cell. What this means is that the bacteriophage replicates it’s own genome within the host cell replication machinery. Other types of bacteriophages package their own replication machinery so they don’t have to borrow it from the host cell. I think that packaging their own replication machinery is significantly less common than borrowing it from the host cell. It is more efficient for the bacteriophage to borrow the replication machinery from the host because it doesn’t have to waste space carrying it to the next host cell if it is already there. Typically during the lysogenic cycle DNA from the bacteriophage is inserted in to the bacterial genome. This is sometimes how genes are passed from bacteria accidentally. It is a really interesting process and sometimes drug resistance accidentally gets passed from bacteria to bacteria.