461: Ingrained Invader Inhibits Infectors

This episode: Training a phage strain on bacteria can increase
its ability to control those bacteria for much longer than an
untrained phage!


Download Episode (5.7 MB, 8.3 minutes)

Show notes:
Microbe of the episode: Pepper yellow leaf curl Indonesia virus


 


News item

 



Takeaways




With resistance to antibiotics spreading more and more
among deadly bacteria, finding alternatives to treat
infections is becoming more important. One option is
phage therapy, using viruses that infect bacteria to
weaken or wipe out pathogens, but this can be tricky.
Sometimes it takes too long to prepare an effective
population of phage for treatment, and sometimes the
target pathogen evolves resistance to the phage too
quickly


 


In this study, a phage that was trained, or pre-evolved,
to infect specific bacteria more effectively, was able to
dominate the population consistently and prevent it from
becoming fully resistant. For comparison, against an
untrained strain of the same phage, the bacteria
developed almost complete resistance after several days.



 
Journal Paper:
Borin JM, Avrani S, Barrick JE, Petrie KL, Meyer JR. 2021.
Coevolutionary phage training leads to greater bacterial
suppression and delays the evolution of phage resistance.
Proc Natl Acad Sci 118.




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Engineered gut bacteria could sense and indicate bowel
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Email questions or comments to bacteriofiles at gmail dot
com. Thanks for listening!


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