Second Inter-Institutional Conference on Bacteriophagy

The conference heard 69 reports from the Soviet Union, as well as China, Poland and Bulgaria. It should be noted that the question of the nature of the bacteriophage has been controversial until recently. A big brake on the recognition of its living nature was the avisuality of the bacteriophage, which did not make it possible to confirm its corpuscularity. Only with the introduction of electron microscopy, electrophoresis, chromatography, the use of radioactive isotopes, data were obtained that not only prove the corpuscular nature of the phage, but also many details of its structure, metabolism, chemical composition, etc. have been discovered. Most modern researchers recognize the living nature of the bacteriophage, considering it a virus , a parasite of bacteria that infects microbial cells.