ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates upon prokaryotic viruses, and almost exclusively deals with bacteriophage and the filamentous phages that infect Escherichia coli. It covers two major areas, firstly the use of bacteriophages to clone recombinant DNA for analysis, and secondly the field of phage display. Further basic work on the structure and replication of the filamentous phages is essential and will clearly assist in the future developments of these bacteriophages as phage vectors. It thus appeared that any peptide sequence could be expressed and displayed on the surface of a filamentous phage, without affecting the viability of the bacteriophage. Bacteriophage GDV particles thus offer the potential for development into successful gene therapy vehicles. The potential is here to exploit bacteriophage GDVs for specific cell targeting with any recombinant gene.
