An Ode to λ

 

I grew up in the phage group and spent many summers at the phage meetings in Cold Spring Harbor. Back then (late 1960s, early 1970s), the best scientists worked on bacteriophage λ (lambda) and the rest of us just tried to keep up.

A number of key insights in molecular biology came from studying this small virus that infects Escherichia coli and if you didn't know about that research you were really out of the loop.

But by 1990 it was already apparent that a new generation of students was growing up in ignorance of the fundamental concepts learned from studying bacteriophage and bacteria. I remember asking a class what they knew about the genetic switch in bacteriophage λ and getting nothing but blank looks! Everyone worked on eukaryotes by then and the knowledge acquired by the phage group was not relevant.

I tried to teach that knowledge in my classes. In my textbook I devoted 27 pages to describing the regulation of phage genes (in a chapter on "Gene Expression and Development"). Other instructors didn't care.

Here's a short list of things we learned from studying λ. How many have you learned?

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