An efficient method for constructing a chimeric bacteriophage T4 to estimate the regulatory signals.

A system for the quantitative estimation of T4 regulatory signals in bacteriophage T4 was developed. We constructed a transmitter-reporter [corrected] plasmid vector, pCV22, which is able not only to fuse transcriptional and translational signals to the coding region of lacZ gene (reporter) but also to transmit the fused gene into T4 phage genome (transmitter). The regulatory signals of T4 phage genes fused with the reporter gene was transmitted efficiently into T4 phage (T4dC-lac phage; a receiver phage) by a replacement type of recombination in the uvsY gene region. This type of chimeric phage was demonstrated to be able to quantitatively estimate the late regulatory signal of T4 phage in vivo.