The baseplate of bacteriophage T4 is a multiprotein molecular machine that controls host cell recognition, attachment, tail sheath contraction and viral DNA ejection. We report here the ...

Schematic diagram of bacteriophage T4. Bacteriophage T4 has a contractile tail and a complex baseplate. Six long-tail fibers are attached to the upper part of the baseplate and six short-tail fibers ...

The WT bacteriophage T4 head is prolate with icosahedral T=13 ends closing the central cylindrical section. The structure of a T=13 icosahedral head assembly, in which the major capsid protein of T4 ...

The tail of bacteriophage T4 is shown before (left) and after (right) binding to a host cell. Upon attachment to the bacterium, the bacteriophage pierces the host cell envelope and injects its ...

Bacteriophage T4 therapy could therefore be engineered to benefit people with rare conditions, who often must seek out very expensive therapies — or may not have any treatment options at all.

T4 is a large, icosahedral phage that may serve as an efficient display platform for foreign peptides or proteins. Here we propose a new method of T4 phage purification by affinity chromatography ...