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Revision as of 12:31, 27 July 2017
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.
Why not yet?
The main reason why phage therapy is not commplace is the fact that antibiotics are still more efficient and easier to use. Most of them work against a wide range of bacterial infections, so it's not necessary to know the exact strain of bacteria. The timing of the treatment is also critical to an efficient phage therapy. This is because effective infection by the bacteriophages is dependent on the stage of the bacterial growth. In other words, the "predator" and the "pray" must be carefully tuned to each other.
Another challenge to be met is the public opinion – it might sound frightening to people to use viruses to counter bacterial infections. However, phage therapy was used in the Soviet union in the 30s and 40s, and there still exists a center for phage therapy in the country of Georgia. This treatment has been met with scepticism by researchers and doctors in the Western world because of unsatisfactory documentation and research method. With more and proper research we believe that it would be possible to gain more acceptance from the research and medical communities.
Our project
For our project, we aim to develop a method of evolving phages capable of infecting a target bacteria strain. We plan to first harvest a catalogue of phages and identify their host bacteria. Phages are plentiful in nature, and by taking different water and soil samples, we will collect a variety of phages capable of infecting different bacteria. By genetically modifying host bacteria, we will accelerate the natural mutation rate of our respective phages. We plan to set up a controlled environment that favorizes phages capable of also infecting the target bacteria. We believe this method will be capable of quickly producing tailored phages, keeping us one step ahead of the resistant bacteria.
Email: igem-team@ntnu.no
