Abstract

The advent of the electron microscope in the late 1930s allowed Luria, Delbruck, and Anderson to measure the physical size of phage, the length of the tail fibers, and to determine the symmetry of the capsid. In this article, they studied four strains of bacterial viruses, three of which consisted of a head and a tail, while the fourth strain had no visible tail. They also observed the interaction between two viruses which acted upon the same strain of E. coli.