I am working with bacteriophage SPP1 to do transduction with Bacillus subtilis. I wonder how specific this SPP 1 phage to host bacteria? Does it work with any strains of B. subtilis or only some strains within this species? or does it work with some species within the Bacillus genus?
Daniel, some strains of B. subtilis are resistant to SPP1, see
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC532427/
some data show that other Bacillus species can be resistant to SPP1 as well http://vir.sgmjournals.org/content/65/11/2067.full.pdf
Usually bacteriophage are host specific but some time they have the broad range host infectivity, it is not necessary that one host specific bacteriophage will not infect the other species of bacteria, If we talk about your bacteriophage that SPP1 can infect the other B. subtilits. Actually some bacteria and many archea evolved a molecular adaptive mechanism know as CRISPR to protect them from bacteriophage and this CRISPR system is also available in some B. subtilits, for the further information you should go through the literature on CRISPR.
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