How to get rid of phage contamination - (Oct/18/2010 )

Hello everyone!

We recently found out that we probably got a phage contamination somewhere - either in our competent bacteria or in our shakers, which are pretty old machines we got from our predecessors in this lab, and which haven't been cleaned properly for a very long time. We observed some strange bands in our protein gels (crude cell lysate, from protein overexpression) - we had a MS analysis of those bands done and got a good hit for a phi80 major capsid protein. Afterwards, we ran a "diagnostic" PCR with primers for that capsid protein on various samples, with positive results.

So, has anybody experienced phage contamination so far? What should we do to get rid of it, and in how far can it influence our experiments (protein expression/purification) negatively?

Thanks for your replies in advance,

Tom

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Best regards,
p