∞ generated and posted on 2022.02.07 ∞
Relative number of plaques that a phage stock is capable of producing.
| Efficiency of Plating, as the concept is normally considered, is the number of plaques produced by a phage under one set of conditions relative to the number of plaques produced by the same phage under a different set of conditions, particularly different strains of indicator bacteria. |
EOP is always relative to some other value, either the experimentally determined phage direct microscopic count (absolute efficiency of plating) or relative to plating under different conditions, such as using a different indicator bacterium (relative efficiency of plating).
This is the definition from Adams (1959), p. 439:
Plaque titer of a phage preparation, determined by plating under stated conditions, relative to some other estimate, usually higher, of the concentration of phage particles.
Note that efficiency of plating is not equivalent to phage viability found while infecting a given host bacterium, or phage viability under a given set of environmental circumstances, though the concept of EOP often is used as such.
This non-equivalence of low EOP with low phage viability is a consequence of the complexity of plaque formation, which requires not just phage ability to productively infect a given host bacterium (= viability) but also is dependent on the rate of the resulting phage population growth, the rate of physical virion spread within a bacterial lawn, and even the rate and extent of bacterial lawn formation.
See by contrast efficiency of center of infection.
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