Something that gives rise to a single plaque upon plating, whether a free phage, a phage-infected bacterium, or a phage-infected bacterial arrangement.
Infective center as well as infectious center serve as synonyms.
Plaque-forming units (PFUs) are equivalent in concept to colony-forming units (CFUs) when plating bacteria, that is, where a single bacterium, bacterial arrangement, or clump of bacteria all can give rise to only a single colony upon plating. From Gill and Young (2012), p. 403: "Analogous to the concept of a colony forming unit (CFU) in bacteriology. As a single virion initiates the formation of a single plaque, enumeration of PFU allows quantification of the number of phages in a given sample. Note that, as is the case with CFU, the number of PFU reflects the number of phages able to form plaques in a sample, not the total number of virions."
For more on this topic, see Wikipedia, Google, and PubMed. Contact web master. Return to terms.
