I am totally new to phage.
The project I'm working on is about a prophage. When I use mitomycin C to induce bacteria lytic cycle I found there are several kinds of plaque(if sorted by size, see pic in attachment). Is that mean there are not only one prophage being induced? What should I do if I only focus on one prophage of that genome.
Thank you.
This is actually typical, you see this frequently when you titer lysates. I think you will find that the plaque size does not breed true showing it is a physiological factor rather than a genetic one. If you want to test to be sure, pick a well separated large plaque and a well separated small plaque into dilution broth (using a sterile toothpick or pipet tip) and titer each and see what sort of plaques each gives.
Agree with Michael, you should definitely pick some isolated plaques and titer each. As with isolating bacteria, regardless of whether the phage associated with plaques look different or not, you should probably incorporate rounds of repicking and titering plaques into your isolation protocol to have confidence that you are dealing with one phage "strain" before sequencing and/or downstream work etc.
You can perform the Transmission electron microscopic (TEM). It provides you more details about phage morphology. you can also go through another alternative way suggested by Dr. Benedik.
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