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Phage therapy, viral phage therapy, or phagotherapy is the therapeutic use of bacteriophages for the treatment of pathogenic bacterial infections. [1] [2] [3] This therapeutic approach emerged at the beginning of the 20th century but was progressively replaced by the use of antibiotics in most parts of the world after the Second World War.
The enterobacteria phage T4, a highly studied phage, targets E. coli for infection. [citation needed] While phage therapy as a treatment for E. coli is unavailable in the US, some commercially available dietary supplements contain strains of phage that target E. coli and have been shown to reduce E. coli load in healthy subjects. [60]
At this point they initiate the reproductive cycle, resulting in lysis of the host cell. As the lysogenic cycle allows the host cell to continue to survive and reproduce, the virus is replicated in all offspring of the cell. An example of a bacteriophage known to follow the lysogenic cycle and the lytic cycle is the phage lambda of E. coli. [55]
E. coli was an integral part of the first experiments to understand phage genetics, [120] and early researchers, such as Seymour Benzer, used E. coli and phage T4 to understand the topography of gene structure. [121] Prior to Benzer's research, it was not known whether the gene was a linear structure, or if it had a branching pattern. [122]
Enterobacteria phage λ (lambda phage, coliphage λ, officially Escherichia virus Lambda) is a bacterial virus, or bacteriophage, that infects the bacterial species Escherichia coli (E. coli). It was discovered by Esther Lederberg in 1950. [ 2 ]
Escherichia virus G4 is a bacteriophage that infects E. coli. [1] First isolated in 1973, the phage was originally isolated from samples of raw sewage and has 5,577 nucleotides. Its isometric capsid contains a single-stranded circular genome of about 5.5 kbp .
In a 1945 study by Demerec and Fano, [4] T7 was used to describe one of the seven phage types (T1 to T7) that grow lytically on Escherichia coli. [5] Although all seven phages were numbered arbitrarily, phages with odd numbers, or T-odd phages, were later discovered to share morphological and biochemical features that distinguish them from T-even phages. [6]
Another way of envisioning phage "organismal" ecology is that it is the study of phage adaptations that contribute to phage survival and transmission to new hosts or environments. Phage "organismal" ecology is the most closely aligned of phage ecology disciplines with the classical molecular and molecular genetic analyses of bacteriophage.