This authoritative, timely, and comprehensively referenced compendium on the bacteriophages explores current views of how viruses infect bacteria. In combination with classical phage molecular genetics, new structural, genomic, and single-molecule technologies have rendered an explosion in our knowledge of phages. Bacteriophages, the most abundant and genetically diverse type of organism in the biosphere, were discovered at the beginning of the 20th century and enjoyed decades of used as anti-bacterial agents before being eclipsed by the antibiotic era. Since 1988, phages have come back into...