At a minimum, the RI protein thus likely plays a role in secondary adsorption signal transduction to protein T [30,32], while the RIII protein along with RI together serve to stabilize the not-yet hole-forming form of protein T. Though not necessarily directly related to LIN, both RI and RIII also may be important to T4-infection productivity (burst size) given very slow bacterial host growth [98]. Here, TBXT is linked to infection.