A phage life cycle over the entirety of which the phage exists as a prophage.
Lysogenic cycles begin with phage reduction to a prophage and end – that is, have completed one cycle – with completion of prophage replication. Lysogenic cycles also can be terminated through the process of induction or, indeed, through prophage curing.
See also lysogen as well as lysogenic infection, lysogenic bacterium, and lysogenic culture.
To distinguish the idea of lysogenic infection from that of lysogenic cycle, one can envisage the latter as being a component of the former. That is, a lysogen exists as a bacterium that is in association with an un-induced prophage which in turn is displaying a lysogenic infection. During that lysogenic infection the bacterium goes through numerous replicative cycles and the prophage simultaneously displays numerous lysogenic cycles.
An infection in other words is something that occurs upon phage genome entrance into a bacterium's cytoplasm whereas a cycle is a phenomenon that is periodic. Lysogenic infections thus tend to involve numerous lysogenic cycles and lysogenic cycles therefore serve as a component of lysogenic infections.
For more on this topic, see Wikipedia, Google, and PubMed. Contact web master. Return to terms.