Bacterial Transduction

Описание: Bacterial recombination is characterized by DNA transfer from one “donor” organism to a “recipient” organism, which allows the bacteria to express new proteins. This may give the bacteria additional functionality such as antibiotic resistance which in turn can be of selective advantage!

The 3 main ways of bacterial recombination include transformation, conjugation and transduction.

Transduction is the process by which DNA is transferred from one bacterium to another through a virus. Transduction is a common tool used by molecular biologists to stably introduce a foreign gene into a host cell’s genome. If the whole thing reminds you of viral transfection it’s because viral transfection and transduction both refer to the same concept.

To better understand transduction, we must first understand viral replication. Viruses are unable to replicate on their own. As such, they can be said to be obligate parasites, meaning that they cannot complete its life-cycle without exploiting a suitable host. Many viruses can switch between a Lysogenic (proliferation of bacteria) and Lytic pathway (proliferation of virus). In lysogeny, the virus combines its genome with the bacterial chromosome. Then it can chill behind enemy lines while the bacteria multiplies, creating more “viral factories”. After an induction event, the virus switches to the lytic pathway, creating so many viruses that the cell lyses or bursts open releasing all these viruses into the surrounding environment.

It’s like if you secretly changed the blueprint of a factory, automatically creating weapons. Then you allow the “enemy” to build all this factories to create weapons. But when you flip a switch, all these factories instead start creating weapons for you…

Now, transduction can occur in 2 ways, called generalized and specialized transduction:

In generalized transduction, the bacteriophages can pick up any portion of the host's genome and transfer it. In contrast, with specialized transduction, the bacteriophages pick up only specific portions of the host's DNA. Scientists have taken advantage of the transduction process to stably introduce genes of interest into various host cells using viruses.