Method employed to assure that infective centers consist predominantly of phage-infected bacteria rather than free phages.
Preadsorption serves as a means of better assuring plaque-size consistency by making sure that the first infections associated with plaque formation are more or less synchronized at the point of plating. Preadsorption also can be used as a means of distinguishing those bacteria which serve as the initial phage host during plaque formation and those bacteria which serve instead as indicator bacteria, i.e., as seen with efficiency of center of infection determinations.
Preadsorption is particularly important to the extent that plaque size serves as a relevant measure, such as a surrogate for phage evolutionary fitness. Preadsorption can also be important when working with phages that display slow rates of adsorption, and particularly so to the extent that this slow adsorption can impact efficiency of plating, that is, the potential for plaques to become visible to the naked eye over the course of incubation.
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