Vibrio cholerae bacteriophage CP-T1: characterization of bacteriophage DNA and restriction analysis.

Temperature bacteriophage CP-T1 of Vibrio cholerae has a capsid that is 45 nm in diameter, a contractile tail 65 nm long and 9.5 nm wide, and a baseplate with several spikes or short tail fibers. The linear double-stranded DNA is 43.5 +/- 1.4 kilobases long, and the phage genome is both terminally redundant and partially circularly permuted. The extent of terminal redundancy is ca. 4%, and circular permutation is up to ca. 44%. Circular restriction maps have been constructed for the enzymes HindIII, EcoRI, BamHI, and PstI. By restriction endonuclease and heteroduplex analyses of phage DNA, the presence and location of a site (pac) at which packaging of phage DNA is initiated was established.