I have observed lysis plaques on ATCC P. aeruginosa 27853 bacterial lawn prepared from overnight bacterial cultures.
The bacterial strain is reported to contain prophage sequences in its genome.
ATCC website also mentions that bacteriophage may be present in the culture.
Could it be prophage induction (maybe due to stress conditions from high cell densities?) or phage contamination?
Does anyone have this problem before?
I don't know about ATCC 27853 specifically but it's pretty common for a lot of Pseudomonas aeruginosa strains to spontaneously form iridescent plaque-looking areas when grown to high density. A lot of older papers talk about it, ex: Article NUTRITIONAL STUDIES ON THE "AUTO-PLAQUE" PHENOMENON IN
Phage induction doesn't seem a likely explanation, as cells that contain a prophage (lysogens) are resistant to superinfection by the same phage. So if these are phage plaques, rather than the 'auto-plaques' mentioned above, they are likely to be due to contamination.
Alexandra Johnson Andrew Jenkins
Thanks for the answers!
It does seem to be phage contamination from the original cell stocks,
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