In a modern take on the Victorian gold rush, a Monash University-led project is successfully "bioprospecting" for viruses known as phages that can kill deadly superbugs.
Cell & Microbiology
May 25, 2023
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7
Viruses are usually associated with illness. But our bodies are full of both bacteria and viruses that constantly proliferate and interact with each other in our gastrointestinal tract. While we have known for decades that ...
Cell & Microbiology
Apr 11, 2023
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43
Bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, may be used as an alternative treatment option when antibiotics fail. Leiden researchers have studied the structure and function of a novel bacteriophage that could be used to ...
Cell & Microbiology
Dec 19, 2022
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67
Researchers from the Quadram Institute and the University of East Anglia have uncovered how resistance has helped drive the emergence of dominant strains of Salmonella. In addition to antimicrobial resistance, resistance ...
Evolution
Nov 25, 2022
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11
In a world first, La Trobe University researchers have discovered a virus that attacks a prominent disease-causing bacterium—a "ringleader" that recruits harmful bacteria to cause periodontitis, and potentially helps cancer ...
Cell & Microbiology
Oct 13, 2022
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21
Bacteria use a variety of defense strategies to fight off viral infection, and some of these systems have led to groundbreaking technologies, such as CRISPR-based gene-editing. Scientists predict there are many more antiviral ...
Cell & Microbiology
Aug 11, 2022
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137
Knowing the structure of a complex biological system isn't nearly enough to understand how it works. It helps to know how the system moves.
Biotechnology
Aug 9, 2022
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130
More and more bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics. Bacteriophages are one alternative in the fight against bacteria. These viruses attack very particular bacteria in a highly specific way. Now a Munich research ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jul 27, 2022
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Antibiotic resistance represents a major public health challenge, and is associated with a high mortality rate. While bacteriophages—viruses that kill bacteria—could be a solution for fighting antibiotic-resistant pathogens, ...
Cell & Microbiology
May 17, 2022
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61
Phage therapy, which uses viruses known as bacteriophages to treat bacterial infections, is a long-standing medical procedure whose mechanisms of action are still poorly understood. Scientists from the Institut Pasteur and ...
Cell & Microbiology
Apr 21, 2022
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9
A bacteriophage (from 'bacteria' and Greek φαγεῖν phagein "to devour") is any one of a number of viruses that infect bacteria. They do this by injecting genetic material, which they carry enclosed in an outer protein capsid. The genetic material can be ssRNA, dsRNA, ssDNA, or dsDNA ('ss-' or 'ds-' prefix denotes single-strand or double-strand) along with either circular or linear arrangement.
Bacteriophages are among the most common and diverse entities in the biosphere. The term is commonly used in its shortened form, phage.
Phages are widely distributed in locations populated by bacterial hosts, such as soil or the intestines of animals. One of the densest natural sources for phages and other viruses is sea water, where up to 9×108 virions per milliliter have been found in microbial mats at the surface, and up to 70% of marine bacteria may be infected by phages. They have been used for over 90 years as an alternative to antibiotics in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as well in France. They are seen as a possible therapy against multi-drug-resistant strains of many bacteria.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
