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The Absolute Rate of the Phage-Antiphage Reaction

Department of Bacteriology and Immunology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri

Abstract

1. The rate of initial combination of a coliphage and antiphage, as deduced from the rate of neutralization, is slower than that predicted on the assumption of perfect adsorption limited by diffusion.

2. This result is confirmed by the relatively high temperature-coefficient, 2.0 for 10° rise in temperature.

3. It is estimated that about one out of 500,000 collisions between the reactants results in combination at 0°C.

4. Since the fraction of fruitful collisions increases rapidly with temperature, it is unlikely that the slowness of the reaction can be attributed to the requirement of specified mutual orientations between phage and antiphage for combination.

5. The rate of reaction is relatively indifferent to pH and presumably to surface potential in the presence of electrolytes.

6. The assumption that activated collisions consist of unoriented collisions between molecules sharing a minimal total kinetic energy of relative translation, leads to the most satisfactory kinetic formulation compatible with the experimental results. This assumption is incompatible with the mosaic hypothesis applied to the structure of simple antigens, and with any high degree of diversity among antibody-molecules.

7. A hypothesis is suggested to account for some differences between the phage-antiphage and the pneumococcus-antipneumococcus reactions.