In nature, the lambda phage packs its own DNA into a head-and-tail structure to infect bacteria. By inserting a cos site into a plasmid, scientists can "trick" the viral packaging machinery into stuffing a large piece of recombinant DNA into a phage head.
Here is a definition for a cosmid, formatted for use in bioinformatics pipelines or genomic annotation files (such as GFF3 or JSON): cosmid
Understanding Cosmids: The Hybrid Vectors of Genetic Engineering In nature, the lambda phage packs its own
Key components of a typical cosmid include: cosmid
