How do phages kill dormant bacteria
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam • Amsterdam, North Holland • Posted July 09, 2026
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Scientific background: If you take a bus, you probably want the driver to be awake. Similarly, bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria) have long been assumed to require metabolically active hosts. However, several recent studies and our own findings challenge this assumption. We have identified over a dozen phages capable of replicating in growth-arrested E. coli, suggesting that dormancy-killing is far more common than previously recognized. How do phages replicate in dormant cells? The phages we discovered are genetically diverse and differentially respond to bacterial knock-outs, pointing to multiple, evolutionarily distinct solutions to this challenge.