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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]
Enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) is a type of Escherichia coli and one of the leading bacterial causes of diarrhea in the developing world, [1] as well as the most common cause of travelers' diarrhea. [2] Insufficient data exists, but conservative estimates suggest that each year, about 157,000 deaths occur, mostly in children, from ETEC.
One promising alternative is the combination of bacteriophage therapy and β-lactam antibiotics. [5] This approach is known as phage-antibiotic synergy (PAS), it has been shown to enhance bacterial elimination, improve biofilm penetration, reduce the emergence of resistant mutants and increase bacterial susceptibility to antibiotics.
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.
Medical microbiology, the large subset of microbiology that is applied to medicine, is a branch of medical science concerned with the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of infectious diseases. In addition, this field of science studies various clinical applications of microbes for the improvement of health.
During fd phage assembly, the phage DNA is first packaged into a linear intracellular nucleoprotein complex with many copies of the phage gene 5 replication/assembly protein. The gene 5 protein is then displaced by the gene 8 coat protein as the nascent phage is extruded across the bacterial plasma membrane without killing the bacterial host.