My student is isolating phages against ESKAPE pathogens, but she is getting a minute plaque. Can you please suggest how to get better results?
A few things that can help give larger plaques are to ensure the plates are fresh and not too dry, make sure your plating host is freshly grown, don't use too much of the plating cells (try reducing the amount by 3-fold and by 10-fold, try incubating your plates at different temperatures.
But some phages just give small plaques.
There are phages (jumbo phages) that form very minute plaques. If you decrease the agar concentration in the soft (let's say to 0.4%), the same phage may form comparatively bigger plaques. This is because if the size of phages is very big, they will not be able to cross smaller agar cross-links formed by high concentration agar (0.7%) and form smaller plaques.
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