Virulence

Virulence is a term used to refer to either

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::the relative pathogenicity

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:or

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::the relative ability to do damage to the host

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of an infectious agent.

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Virulent phage infect their bacterial hosts and lyse them after intracellular propagation. Rather than integrating their genome in the host genome a production of new phage progeny is started.

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Phage: A phage (also called bacteriophage) (in Greek phageton = food/consumption) is a small virus that infects only bacteria. Like viruses that infect eukaryotes, phages consist of an outer protein hull and the enclosed genetic material (which consists of double-stranded DNA in 95% of the phages known) of...

Genome: In biology the genome of an organism is the whole hereditary information of an organism that is encoded in the DNA (or, for some viruses, RNA). This includes both the genes and the non-coding sequences. The term was first coined, in 1920, by Hans Winkler, Professor of Botany at the University of Ham...