What is a Bacteriophage?

Before going into more depth about bacteriophages, it is important to understand what exactly a bacteriophage is. To begin, a bacteriophage (also referred to as a phage) is a virus.  Like other viruses, phages must infect bacteria in order to reproduce, which they can do either via a lytic lifecycle and/or a lysogenic lifecycle.
The lytic lifecycle involves the phage acting as a typical virus: it attaches to the host cell and injects its DNA leading to the creation of many new phages inside of the host cell. The replicating of the phages causes the host cell to lyse (burst), killing it in the process. The lysogenic lifecycle of a virus begins the same way as the lytic cycle, with the injection of DNA into the host cell. However, this lifecycle doesn't result in the death of the host cell. Instead the phage's inserted DNA, called the prophage, is not active and doesn't drive the production of new phages.
The structure of a bacteriophage and a basic idea of how the virus reproduces is shown in the images below.

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