Bacteriophages: Not So Alien

Fans of the 1979 movie Alien may remember the shocking scene in which the alien creature erupts from a spaceship crew member’s chest. That scene epitomizes what bacteriophages do. They infect a target bacterial cell, replicate within the cell, and then cause the cell to rupture, releasing additional progeny bacteriophages that infect other target bacterial cells. The difference between the movie scenario and reality is that bacteriophages—phages, for short—attack only their spe…