Almost 185 years later, Trevor Lithgow, a biochemist at Monash University, and a student in his charge visited that same lovely stream, bent down at its bank with an empty flask attached to a broom pole, and retrieved a double shot of water. They bundled the sample into a bag and drove it back to examine at their laboratory.
There, they mixed the sample with a culture of Klebsiella pneumoniae, a rod-shaped bacteria, prevalent in nature, and one that colonises human stomachs and lines our intestines. It forms snot-like colonies, gobbling up and fermenting lactose to fuel itself. Usually, Klebsiella is harmless.
But in certain situations, Klebsiella can establish itself outside the gut – and then it becomes a threat. “You would not want to have an infection that’s driven by Klebsiella,” Lithgow says.
Klebsiella is defined by the World Health Organization as a “priority pathogen”. Some prefer to call it a “superbug”. It’s a bacteria that poses a major threat to global health because some strains have evolved to evade our most potent drugs, in a process known as antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
Yeah phages have extreme specificity just like most other viruses, and that is both a really big advantage and a really big challenge, on the one hand if you get it right you rest assured it will absolutely not harm anything other than that one single target bacteria you breed it against, no antibiotics can be nearly as safe in comparison, but then on the other hand like you said it requires you to take time and lots of work to breed a culture first before it can be used at all :/
Maybe in the future this process can be automated, and maybe we can even do genetic engineering to create engineered phages on demand in an artificial process that’s much faster… Oh well one could dream lol
How about a big spicy super phage cocktail tailored to many different strains of the bacteria under question while a specialised culture is pending? May get a match, no harms if it doesn’t
I think that’s exactly what people were referring to when they say “culture for specific bacteria”. Remember it’s not a bacteria species that phages target, rather it’s molecular signature on certain bacteria they target, and it’s a constant arms race in the nature, so there could be endlessly many possible kinds of molecular signatures found on what’s technically the exact same species of bacterium.
So they are not “breeding a phage culture for one bacteria”, rather they were breeding phage culture for the 1000 or so kind of molecular signatures, out of millions of trillions possible ones.
Exactly, spot on. A cocktail of phage just for that one bacterium would surely get a good hit rate when diverse enough
I was gonna say I wonder how advances in dna / rna manipulation will affect that but now we’re getting into a topic that I last interacted with in like 2-3 101-102 level college courses 5+ years ago 😅