Question

6. Generally, most members of a species have the same biochemical traits and cultural characteristics. Imagine that you are in charge of investigating an outbreak of Salmonella food poisoning. You need to determine if everyone that reported being ill with it got it from the same source. Propose how you might use your knowledge of phage typing to do this.

Answer 1

To know whether everyone got the infection from same source, we need to prove that the organism isolated from everyone has the same phage type

The phage typing help to differentiate the organism to subspecies level

For this the test organism is inoculated as lawn culture on nutrient agar and drops of routine test dose of known set of different phages are spot inoculated. Zone of lysis will be produced in areas where the test organism is susceptible to the phages applied. Phage type is designated based on the ability of different phages to lyse the organism