Ff phages

Ff phages (for F specific filamentous phages) is a group of almost identical filamentous phage (genus Inovirus) including phages f1, fd, M13 and ZJ/2, which infect bacteria bearing the F fertility factor. The virion (virus particle) is a flexible filament measuring about 6 by 900 nm, comprising a cylindrical protein tube protecting a single-stranded circular DNA molecule at its core. The phage codes for only 11 gene products, and is one of the simplest viruses known. It has been widely used to study fundamental aspects of molecular biology. George Smith and Greg Winter used f1 and fd for their work on phage display for which they were awarded a share of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Early experiments on Ff phages used M13 to identify gene functions, and M13 was also developed as a cloning vehicle, so the name M13 is sometimes used as an informal synonym for the whole group of Ff phages.

The virion is a flexible filament (worm-like chain) about 6 nm in diameter and 900 nm long. Several thousand copies of a small (50 amino-acid residues) elongated alpha-helical major coat protein subunit (the product of gene 8, or p8) in an overlapping shingle-like array form a hollow cylinder enclosing the circular single-stranded DNA genome. Each p8 subunit has a collection of basic residues near the C-terminus of the elongated protein and acidic residues near the N-terminus; these two regions are separated by about 20 hydrophobic (non-polar) residues. The shingle-like arrangement places the acidic residues of p8 near the outside surface of the cylinder, where they cause the virus particle to be negatively-charged; non-polar regions near non-polar regions of neighbouring p8 subunits, where non-polar interactions contribute to a notable physical stability of the virus particle; and basic residues near the centre of the cylinder, where they interact with the negatively-charged DNA phosphates at the core of the virion. Longer (or shorter) DNA molecules can be packaged, since more (or fewer) p8 subunits can be added during assembly as required to protect the DNA, making the phage useful for genetic studies. (This effect should not be confused with polyphage, which can package several separate and distinct DNA molecules). About 5 copies each of four minor proteins cap the two ends of the virion.

The molecular structure of the virion capsid (the assembly of p8 subunit proteins) has been determined by X-ray fiber diffraction, and structural models have been deposited in the Protein Data Bank. In particular, the series of fd and Pf1 virion structures deposited in the PDB over decades illustrate the improvements in methods for fiber diffraction data collection and computational analysis. Structures of the p3 capsid protein and the p5 replication/assembly protein have also been determined from X-ray crystallography and deposited in the PDB.^{[citation needed]}

The DNA sequence of the fd genome has 6408 nucleotide comprising 9 genes, but the genome has 11 open reading frames producing 11 proteins, since two genes, gene 2 and gene 1, have internal in-frame translation starts, generating two additional proteins, p10 and p11. The genome also contains a short non-coding intergenic sequence. M13 and f1 sequences are slightly different from fd. They both have only 6407 nucleotides; f1 differs from fd in 180 positions (only 10 of these changes are reflected in amino-acid changes in gene products) and M13 has only 59 nucleotide differences from f1. For many purposes the phages in the Ff group can be considered as interchangeable.

Five gene products are part of the virion: the major coat protein (p8) and the minor proteins capping the two ends, p3 and p6 at one end, and p7 and p9 at the other end. Three gene products (p2, p5, and p10) are cytoplasmic proteins needed for DNA synthesis and the rest are membrane proteins involved in assembly of the virion.

The gene encoding p1 has been used as a conserved marker gene, along with three other features specific for inovirus genomes, in an automatic machine-learning approach to identify over 10000 inovirus-like sequences from microbial genomes.

The p3 protein is anchored to one end of the virion by the C-terminal domain of p3. Infection of host bacteria involves interaction of two different N-terminal regions of p3 with two different sites of the host bacteria. First, the N2 domain of p3 attaches to the outer tip of the F-pilus, and the pilus retracts into the cell. This retraction may involve depolymerization of the pilus subunit assembly into the cell membrane at the base of the pilus by a reversal of the pilus growth and polymerization process. As the tip of the pilus bearing p3 approaches the cell wall, the N1 domain of p3 interacts with the bacterial TolQRA protein to complete infection and release the genome into the cytoplasm of the host.

After the single-stranded viral DNA enters the cytoplasm, it serves as a template for the synthesis of a complementary DNA strand. This synthesis is initiated in the intergenic region of the DNA sequence by host RNA polymerase, which synthesizes a short RNA primer on the infecting DNA as template. The host DNA polymerase III then uses this primer to synthesize the full complementary strand of DNA, yielding a double-stranded circle, sometimes called the replicative form (RF) DNA. The complementary strand of the RF is the transcription template for phage coded proteins, especially p2 and p10, which are necessary for further DNA replication.^{[citation needed]}