New Way to Control Drug-Resistant Bacteria

Through serendipity, researchers have found that bacteriophages contain genes that allow them to quickly change their proteins to bind to different cell receptors, a discovery that could lead to genetically engineered phages to treat bacterial infections that have become resistant to antibiotics.

The discovery was made by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA, USA), led by Jeffrey F. Miller, Ph.D., professor and chair of microbiology, immunology, and molecular genetics. Dr. Miller's team was working on another project when they found that the genome of the phage that infects Bordetella bronchiseptica, a relative of the bacterium that causes whooping cough, contains a series of genes that change the part of the virus that binds to the bacterial cell. These genes allow the phage to rapidly evolve new variants that can recognize and attack bacteria that may have become resistant to the previous phage.

"Phage therapy has been practiced for nearly a hundred years in parts of the world, and even in the United States in the first half of the 20th century,” explained Dr. Miller. "But now we think we can engineer bacteriophages to function as ‘dynamic' antimicrobial agents. This could provide us with a renewable resource of smart antibiotics for treating bacterial diseases.”

Dr. Miller and his team are continuing to study this genetic mechanism to learn more about its biochemical properties and to determine whether higher forms of life have similar classes of genes. In time, Dr. Miller believes they will be able to use this knowledge to generate proteins in the laboratory that will bind to almost any molecule of interest. "Without increased understanding of how bacteriophages work, we can potentially tailor these viruses to infect and destroy bacteria that have mutated and become drug-resistant.”




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