Isolation and rapid genetic characterization of a novel T4-like bacteriophage

Ubiquitous on earth, bacteriophages are the most abundant entities in every ecosystem, but human knowledge about them is still limited compared with that about other forms of organisms. To enrich human knowledge and promote the utilization of bacteriophages, it is necessary to isolate and characterize as many as possible different bacteriophages. Here we describe the isolation of a T4-like bacteriophage IME08 and a rapid method for its genetic characterization. With this method we easily cloned a few random fragments of the bacteriophage genome. Sequence analysis of these random clones showed that bacteriophage IME08 shared the highest sequence similarity with T4-like Enterobacteria phage T4 (94% identity), JS98 (95% identity), JS10 (95% identity) and RB14 (94% identity) respectively, which suggested that IME08 belonged to T4-like bacteriophage genus.