For Safer Food, Just Add Viruses
1–10 of 19 posts
Re: For Safer Food, Just Add Viruses
#2This was fascinating. Could phages be engineered to attack mrsa and other superbugs we see in hospitals?
Re: For Safer Food, Just Add Viruses
#3Given that the human digestive tract (reportedly) contains more bacteria than the human body has cells, and they are vital to our survival, how can spraying bacteria-killers on food not be harmful?
Re: For Safer Food, Just Add Viruses
#4This could be a replacement for antibiotics once they become completely ineffective
Re: For Safer Food, Just Add Viruses
#5Given that the human digestive tract (reportedly) contains more bacteria than the human body has cells, and they are vital to our survival, how can spraying bacteria-killers on food not be harmful?
According to this link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3278644/ phages target specific pathogenic bacteria, and "[...]phages only minimally impact non-target bacteria or body tissues". So that would mean that even though they target bacteria, they would only target a specific bacteria and not all.
Re: For Safer Food, Just Add Viruses
#6Given that the human digestive tract (reportedly) contains more bacteria than the human body has cells, and they are vital to our survival, how can spraying bacteria-killers on food not be harmful?
According to this link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3278644/ phages target specific pathogenic bacteria, and "[...]phages only minimally impact non-target bacteria or body tissues". So that would mean that even though they target bacteria, they would only target a specific bacteria and not all.
Phages will and do target E. Coli and other "pathogenic" bacterium that do in fact reside in your digestive system
Re: For Safer Food, Just Add Viruses
#7Given that the human digestive tract (reportedly) contains more bacteria than the human body has cells, and they are vital to our survival, how can spraying bacteria-killers on food not be harmful?
According to this link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3278644/ phages target specific pathogenic bacteria, and "[...]phages only minimally impact non-target bacteria or body tissues". So that would mean that even though they target bacteria, they would only target a specific bacteria and not all.
You do have to wonder if they aren't over-stating the specificity. The older I get, the more I come to expect the unstated "but..." on claims like that. As the saying goes, "When it's too good to be true, it probably is."
Re: For Safer Food, Just Add Viruses
#8Elanco, sells a liquid phage product called Finalyse that is sprayed on the hides of cattle before they’re slaughtered.
I'm thinking that name is just a little too on the button.
Re: For Safer Food, Just Add Viruses
#9Viruses seem so weird to me. They're naturally emergent nanobots.
Re: For Safer Food, Just Add Viruses
#10This was fascinating. Could phages be engineered to attack mrsa and other superbugs we see in hospitals?
It depends.
There are extant phage that predate staph, like Phage K. There are some hurdles you'd need to overcome. Foremost among these is when compared to antibiotics, phage suck for treating disease. This is a big part of the reason everyone beat a path to antibiotics
Phage are extremely narrow spectrum. You can select for a high-fitness phage with serial passages: Plate the host bacterium along with some phage. Find the largest region of dead host (a plaque), pick it and repeat for several hundred generations. The good news is that you'll have a high-fitness phage. The bad news is that it will probably only infect the particular strain of bacteria you've been using to select it. I worked with a fitness optimized E.coli phage that wild-type E.coli probably would have laughed off. I haven't read the therapeutic phage literature, but my assumption would be that you may need to optimize
Phage have some issues with immune clearance. The immune system really loves to eliminate foreign looking viruses. The concentration of phage injected intramusucularly falls very fast. Again, this might be something you can overcome with serial passages. There was some work in rabbits where the authors found an enrichment for mutations in the capsid (the phage's head). I don't recall if they quantified the fitness impact of these mutations.
If I ever get out of software development, it'll probably be to work on phage.