Bacterial Transfection

Bacterial Transfection

Bacterial transfection refers to - ‘the infection of bacteria by purified phage DNA after pretreatment with Ca²⁺ ions or conversion to spheroplasts.

Nevertheless, the wonderful discovery of transformation critically revealed that ‘large mo-lecular weight DNA’ may also penetrate the cell walls of a plethora of so called competent bacteria. In fact, Fraenkel-Courat et al., (1957) amply demonstrated that the purified RNA meticulously derived from the well known tobacco mosaic virus was also found to be equally ‘infective’ in nature.

Since then, quite a few classical examples of the ‘infective characteristic features’ of the nu-cleic acids viz., DNA, RNA, have been adequately brought to light to the knowledge of the various researchers. Foldes and Trautner (1964) proved to be the pioneers to exhibit and demonstrate explicitely that the ‘protoplasts’ of organisms may also be duly infected even with the ‘purified nucleic acid’, which phenomenon was baptized by them as ‘Transfection’. However, it was duly ascertained that the ‘competent cells’ exclusively were found to be sensitive and the infection was equally sensitive to the enzyme DNAase.

Consequently, further extensive and intensive studies do ascertain that ‘transfection’ is duly extended to a plethora of other organisms as well.