Newly discovered virus can kill resistant bacteria

“We have found five new species that we believe are unknown to science,” said Associate Professor Clare Kirkpatrick, who studies the bacterial stress response in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Southern Denmark. .

The somewhat surprising discovery was made during the coronavirus pandemic, when some of Kirkpatrick’s students were unable to conduct their normal laboratory studies of microbes and so went on field trips to local streams to see if they had interesting microbes to offer.

The fact that viruses exist in nature is not surprising, since it is the most widespread organism in the world. They are everywhere and part of all kinds of microbial cycles and ecosystems, but the fact that five potentially new species have appeared in local streams surprised Clare Kirkpatrick.

While four of the five have yet to have their genome mapped in genome sequencing, one species has now been fully sequenced, scientifically described, named and published in Microbiology Resource Announcements. The name is Fyn8.

Many viruses are called bacteriophages (or phages), which means they kill bacteria, and Fyn8 is no exception. It can attack and kill bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a bacterium naturally present in soil and water. It is normally harmless to healthy people, but like many other bacteria it has developed resistance to antibiotics and is found in hospitals.

For example, patients with wounds (such as burns) and patients on a ventilator are at risk of getting an infection that cannot be fought with antibiotics.

Researchers have no doubt that Fyn8 can effectively kill Pseudomonas aeruginosa:

“We could see it with the naked eye: clear holes appeared in the layer of Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria in our Petri dishes, where Fyn8 infected the bacteria cells, killed them, multiplied and attacked the next one.”

Considering that the world is facing a resistance crisis, where more people will die from infection with resistant bacteria than from cancer, the new finding is of course interesting and begs the question; Can phages help us in the fight against resistant bacteria?

Research in this area was uncommon until recently, both in academic research institutes and in pharmaceutical companies. In the past and in other parts of the world however, there has been some research, and phages have also been used to treat infections in Eastern European countries in particular.

Phages were discovered in the early 20th century by researchers who had their bacterial cultures destroyed by viral infections.

The benefits of this discovery were obvious, but antibiotics, not phages, became the most common remedy for bacterial infections.

One reason may have been that antibiotics were easy to produce and use, while phages were difficult to isolate and administer to patients.

Another reason was probably also that a dose of antibiotic could kill many different bacteria, whereas a phage only corresponds to a single bacterial species.

“But today it is relatively easy to manufacture precision drugs for each patient. First you need to know what exact bacteria a patient is infected with, and then you can treat the patient with exactly the phage that will kill the bacteria,” Clare explained. Kirkpatrick.

She adds that this strategy works even on bacteria resistant to all known antibiotics.

Time will tell if there are more new virus species in local streams near the University of Southern Denmark campus, but it’s quite likely, Clare Kirkpatrick believes: