h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I believe (though I may be wrong, I was 15 when I last set an employed foot into a biochem lab I'm now a physicist) that the T-evens are also used to detect the presence of the host bacterium. I'm not entirely sure how this works, but apparently E. Coli (well done by the way for making the distinction escherichia - whenever I talk about entamoeba coli people assume they're going to die) tests aren't incredibly accurate so it is more useful to make 'phage counts (The T4 bacteriophage) and from that determine the level of coliform contamination.

Apart from that having been neglected I thought that this was a very good article - except doesn't 1 virus + 1 virus = 2 viri?

Thanks for your input. The whole range of phages T1 to T7 infect e.coli. They were the 7 that American phage biologists first concentrated on and were given their type designations arbitrarily. The T-evens: 2, 4 and 6 turned out, coincidentally, to have similarities.

This article is meant to be a brief overview of bacteriophages rather than the definitive last word on them so I hadn't attempted to cram all available data into it.

You might be right about the plural term for virus being "viri" rather than "viruses" but I'd rather stick with common language usage. I haven't come across the term "viri" so I guess, if it was ever used, the language has moved on since that time.

Well, I DID say it had been a long time...

I owe you a thank you. You made me read the part about T4 in the entry again and I found a definite where there should be an indefinite article. Thanks Casanova.

Always happy to be of assistance.