Dear Jacob, these are the hallmark signs for a bacteriophage infection. I'm afraid you'll have lots of bleaching / baking of glassware to do... Once you have them in the lab, they're very hard to get rid of. You can test one of your previous constructs that didn't lyse the cells; if these now do: you definitely have phages.
Cheers Filip Van Petegem On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 9:42 AM, Jacob Keller <j-kell...@md.northwestern.edu>wrote: > Dear crystallographers, > > I recently expressed some new constructs, and found after my usual > expression protocol that the cell pellets were not compacted at the bottom > corner of the bottles us usual, but were instead smeared as a film on the > side, and further, were somewhat clumpy, like clots, and with a smaller > pellet in the usual location. The centrifugation was exactly as usual. I > noticed that there was also a bit more foam in the medium than usual, but I > am not convinced that this was the issue, although it might be a symptom. My > suspicion is that the constructs are lethal and cause cell lysis, but I am > not sure. Has anybody seen this phenomenon before, and gotten to the bottom > of it? > > Jacob Keller > > ******************************************* > Jacob Pearson Keller > Northwestern University > Medical Scientist Training Program > Dallos Laboratory > F. Searle 1-240 > 2240 Campus Drive > Evanston IL 60208 > lab: 847.491.2438 > cel: 773.608.9185 > email: j-kell...@northwestern.edu > ******************************************* > -- Filip Van Petegem, PhD Assistant Professor The University of British Columbia Dept. of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology 2350 Health Sciences Mall - Rm 2.356 Vancouver, V6T 1Z3 phone: +1 604 827 4267 email: filip.vanpete...@gmail.com http://crg.ubc.ca/VanPetegem/
