Nat Commun: A new mechanism for phages to kill bacteria.

August 5, 2020 /--- -- A monash University study has made encouraging findings that could eventually lead to targeted treatments against drug-resistant bacterial infections.
the study was led by Associate Professors Fasséli Coulibaly and Trevor Lithgow of the Monash Institute for Biomedical Discovery and published in the journal Nature Communications.
describes how phages attack and kill typhoid salmonella using high-resolution imaging, giving scientists new ideas about how to use it in the ongoing fight against microbial resistance (AMR).
the study was a collaboration between researchers at the Monash Institute for Biomedical Discovery (BDI), monash University's AMR Impact Centre and the University of Cambridge.
what they saw was the incredible "arrangement" that phages produce when they assemble the main components of their particles: a head full of viral DNA and a tail for infecting bacteria.
(Photo source: www.pixabay.com) "We saw in our complex dance design how the structural elements of particles interlock each other.
at the molecular level, the arms swing outwards and curl with each other, forming a continuous chain that supports the head of the phage.
hard chain armor provides further protection for the DNA of phages.
, on the other hand, the tail remains flexible.
it can bend without breaking because it captures bacteria and eventually injects bacteria into the phage DNA.
" phage is a type of virus that infects bacteria, and each phage targets the type of bacteria it can kill.
can purify phages to FDA-approved levels to treat people with bacterial infections, and have been successful in the United States, Europe and more recently in Australia.
Monash University, researchers are working to address these issues in order to develop the type of phage needed for a new type of "phage therapy" for bacterial infections.
Lithgow said:
The findings will help us overcome the most critical barrier to phage therapy, which is understanding how phages work in order to predict and accurately select the best phage for each patient infection."
" antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the greatest threats to global health, food security and economic development.
" it can help transform phage therapy into a wider range of clinical uses.
.com Source: Peering into the secrets of the phages to see how they kill superbugs Original source: Joshua M. Hardy, Rhys A. Dunstan, Rhys Grinter, Matthew J. Belousoff, Jia Wangwei, Derek Pickard, Hariprasad Venugopal, Dougan, Trevor. The architecture and stabilisation of flagellotropic tailed bacteriophages. Nature Communications, 2020; 11 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17505-w.