Why phages?

Bacteriophages have the potential to solve one of the greatest medical threats of our time: antibiotic resistant bacteria. They are capable of killing select bacteria, while leaving other bacteria, as well as animal and plant cells, unharmed. For this reason they are not harmful to humans and animals. As with antibiotics, bacteria are able to develop resistance against phages, but this process is much slower for phages, and it's much easier to develop new effective phages than to make new antibiotics. Moreover bacteriophages are easily available as they exist more or less everywhere, and are plentiful in both soil and aquatic environments. For engineering purposes some advantages are that they have intrinsic evolutionary capabilities, as well as being easily manipulated and grown in large numbers. This is something we will try to take advantage of in our project.

There are many potential applications of bacteriophages. In the area of medicine, phage therapy is the most obvious use of phages, but they might also be used for sanitazion purposes. Bacteria also play a major role in areas such as agriculture, both in terms of livestock feed and plant health, aquaculture, food processing, especially of cheese and dairy products, as well as wine production and brewing. Bacteriphages could potentially be used to counter unwanted bacterial growth in all these areas. Precision control of microbial growth might also be a possible future application.