Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a bacterium that commonly occurs in soil and water. While it is harmless to healthy people, it has developed a resistance to antibiotics and can be found in hospitals, where it may infect people with wounds and those on ventilators. Novel ways to treat people infected with the bacteria are crucial.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Danish researchers went on field trips to local creeks to see if they contained any interesting microbes. In doing so, they found five new species that they believed were ‘previously unknown to science’. While they are yet to sequence four of the microbes, they managed to sequence one, known as Fyn8.
Fyn8 is a kind of virus known as a bacteriophage, which is known to kill bacteria. When applied to petri dishes containing pseudomonas aeruginosa, Fyn8 was able to infect the bacterial cells, kill them, and multiply to attack other bacteria.
While bacteriophages were discovered at the beginning of the 20th century, antibiotics became more popular as they were easier to produce and use. Antibiotics could also kill many different bacteria at once, whereas bacteriophages only address singular bacterial species.
"But today it is relatively easy to make precision medicine for the individual patient. First you find out what exact bacteria a patient is infected with -- and then you can treat the patient with exactly the phage that will kill the bacteria," explained associate professor Clare Kirkpatrick, who studies bacterial stress-response at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Southern Denmark, one of the authors of the study, in a press release.
While further research is needed to understand how the Fyn8 works in live models, the findings offer an exciting avenue for exploration amid the current antibiotic resistance crisis. And Dr. Kirkpatrick indicated that there might be many, many more useful bacteriophages waiting to be discovered.
Sources: Science Daily, Microbiology