Bacteriophage Therapy
Matthew Bardales
Doctor Butela
Microbiology Lecture
April 23, 2014
Bacteriophages, also known as phages, are obligate intracellular parasites that utilize the metabolic pathways of bacteria to reproduce. Phages are viruses with a very specific host range, consisting of either DNA or RNA as the nucleic acid (Mayer). Many experiments were conducted in the 1920s in the United States and abroad to test bacteriophages as a form of disease control. The discovery of antibiotics resulted in the abandonment of phage research because of the ability of antibiotics to affect multiple bacteria. Bacteriophages that can kill bacteria have a strong lytic cycle. This lytic cycle will eventual result in the destruction of the bacteria in order for the new phages to escape from the cell. Bacteriophages kill the bacteria they infect, which would help an individual fight off a disease (Carlton).
There are four major stages of development in the lytic cycle for a bacteriophage. The first step is the attachment of the bacteriophage to the outside coat of an appropriate bacterium. This attachment phase is accomplished by chemical reactions between the phage and the host bacterium. The phage is then absorbed into the bacterium and the nucleic acid is transferred to the bacterium. Then the bacteriophage hijacks the biochemical metabolism of the bacterium in order to produce various parts of new bacteriophages. The various parts of the bacteriophage assemble into new phages and then the bacterium is lysed so that the new phages can escape. This lyses stage effectively kills the bacterium (Phage).
The development of antibiotic resistant bacteria has renewed interest in bacteriophage...
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...cteria, it cannot be changed or altered to regain effectiveness. It would be much easier and less costly for pharmacologists to mutate an already known strain of a bacteriophage than find a new antibiotic. If phage technology against disease became common, we would not see the lack of research in the field of controlling microbes.
Right now, it is much more profitable for drug companies to find medications that treat diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease rather than invest in the process of finding a new antibiotic. Companies would be much more willing to mutate an already known phage. This would prevent the antibacterial crisis that is occurring in hospitals now. Unfortunately, resistant bacteria are evolving faster than companies can find and produce new antibiotics. A new method of bacterial control is necessary to continue to fight of nosocomial infections.
Kanamycin antibiotics must be further improve so that in the future, more stronger bacteria with more strains can be eliminated but the concentration of the active pharmaceutical ingredients must be controlled so that it will not exceed certain concentration that leads to harmful side effects on the consumer.
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are created when mutations in the pathogen's genetic code occurs, changing the protein in the bacteria that the antibiotics normally go after into a shape that the antibiotic can not recognize. The average bacteria divides every twenty minutes, so if a contaminated spot has one single bacteria in the morning, there could be trillions on that same spot at the end of the day. That means that when counting all the possibilities of mutations, the amount of mutated offspring that the bacteria might have formed during those replications could be as high as in the millions. Fortunately though, this does not happen so frequently that it is normally an issue. The amount of non-mutated bacteria vastly outnumbers the mutated ones and many of the mutations occurring in the bacteria usually have either a harmful effect, or not effect at all on its function. That means that the pathogen is still relatively less harmful than it c...
Pathogenic bacteria initially intrigued me last year, when I created an award-winning analysis on phage-host specificity. Exploring antibiotic resistance inspired me to harness phages as antidotes to bacterial infections. I became curious about drug resistance in mycobacteria while annotating the genome of a phage that may infect M. tuberculosis. To that end, I aspire to develop novel treatments for infectious diseases throughout my academic and professional careers. My desire to become a biomedical scientist has empowered me to apply for the Wadsworth Center Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program.
...overies and inventions have greatly impacted the present day burden of infectious disease resulting from microbes in an even more populated environment. There are quite a number of microbe vaccines available that make it possible to deal with the threat of emerging microbes as either complete elimination or coexistence perspective
Being a gram-negative bacterium, L. pneumophila has lipopolysaccharides (LPS) that act as endotoxin within a human host. The presence of a flagella is thought to mediate adherence to human lung cells, thereby causing infection, since flagella-less strains do not cause disease. Once attached to human cells, the organism is engulfed by a macrophage where is utilizes the internal environment to multiply.
Bacteria are living organisms, and as such they have the ability to evolve by mutation and natural selection. This is the process by which random genetic mutations create individuals better suited to their environment, which then live to reproduce. The progeny of this individual will then have this mutation, and so a species evolves. One of the largest problems facing the medical profession today is that harmful, that ...
Some have the ability to pump violating bacteria out, and others produce an enzyme called NDM-1, this allows it to essentially "chew up" the bacteria and therefore leaving it ineffective. The genes inside these bacteria have evolved over centuries and are now left nearly incurable. A team of MIT researchers have developed their own gene editing system that has the potential to switch on and off particular genes in the bacteria and therefore turning the gene that spurs the antibiotic resistance. This system works by taking control of the bacteria's own immune
Bacteria that is resistant to antibiotics is a major problem not only for the United States, but worldwide. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2012) the cause is related to “widespread overuse, as well as inappropriate use, of antibiotics that is fueling antibiotic resistance”. According to World Health Organization (2013) resistance is a global concern for several reasons; it impedes the control of infectious diseases, increases healthcare costs, and the death rate for patients with resistant bacterial infections is twice of those with non-resistant bacterial infections.
Compounding all of these solutions, the pharmaceutical industry needs to conduct extensive research on developing new antibiotics for various pathogenic bacteria by studying the bacterial structure. This will help scientists to formulate ways of counteracting the functions of the various constituents of bacteria.
Antibiotic resistance is bacteria’s loss of susceptibility to the bactericidal or growth-inhibiting properties of an antibiotics. When a resistant strain of bacteria is the dominant strain in an infection, the infection may be untreatable and deadly he primary mechanisms of bacterial gene transfer are transduction and conjugation. Transduction occurs when a bacterial virus, called a bacteriophage, detaches from one bacterial cell, carrying with it some of that bacterium’s genome, and then infects another cell. When the bacteriophage inserts its genetic content into the genome of the next bacterium, the previous bacterium’s DNA also is incorporated into the genome. Conjugation occurs when two bacteria come into physical contact with each other and a plasmid, sometimes carry...
Antibiotics have been vitally important for many years in treating infectious diseases in both, humans and animals. Their discovery was described as the miracle of the 20th century [1]. However the overuse of antibiotics caused the emergence of a new problem, antibiotic resistance.
Bacteria are found nearly everywhere within the body and most types are harmless or even helpful to bodily function (Novitt-Moreno). While it is important to have these bacteria in the body, pathogenic invaders can cause serious illnesses. Pathogenic bacteria work by either actually attacking a part of the victim’s body or releasing toxic waste products into the body. Bacteria are single-celled and contain all of the cellular mechanisms needed to live, grow, and reproduce (Novitt-Moreno). That means, when treating a bacterial infection, it is critical to have a highly specific antibiotic that can destroy the unwanted
...gests that the world is on the brink of a post-antibiotic era as the numbers of resistant bacteria (superbugs) proliferate, and there is an increase in the number of people dying from previously treatable infections. Todar, (n.d) states, “Society could be faced with previously treatable diseases that have become again untreatable, as in the days before antibiotics were developed.”
Bacteria have recently been found to resist a thousand times their normal dose of antibiotics (Baym et al. 2016). This increasing resistance in bacteria has left scientists searching for a more potent replacement to antibiotics, paving the way to increasing research on phage therapy. However, because the therapeutic use of bacteriophages is a novel discovery, its effectiveness and safety need to be further researched. In this essay, I will explore the safety, the advantages, and the disadvantages of phage therapy.
Bacteriophages are viruses that attack bacteria. Bacteriophages are obligate intracellular parasites. Bacteriophages are infections, which are a hereditary matter pressed inside a protein layer. A few infections contain a little lipid (fat) or hints of different substances. Infections are not cells. They are little particles that increase just inside living cells. Phages can't reproduce or engender outside their host cell, phages are not helpless to anti-infection agents, phages are omnipresent, phages are the most plenteous life-structure on earth, phages can get by in pretty much any environment, and they can be discovered both inside and outside bacterial cells.