Bacteriophages are bacterial-specific viruses and the most abundant biological form on Earth. Each bacterial species possesses one or multiple bacteriophages and the specificity of infection makes them a promising alternative for bacterial control and environmental safety, as a biotechnological tool against pathogenic bacteria, including those resistant to antibiotics. This application can be either directly into foods and food-related environments as biocontrol agents of biofilm formation. In addition, bacteriophages are used for microbial source-tracking and as fecal indicators. The present review will focus on the uses of bacteriophages like bacterial control tools, environmental safety indicators as well as on their contribution to bacterial control in human, animal, and environmental health.
Introduction
Bacteriophages, also known as phages, are prokaryotes viruses, being the most abundant life form, present in all environments and the predominant entities in the sea (Boehme, 1993; Suttle, 2005). Several studies have demonstrated a 1:5 relative abundance between bacteria and bacteriophage (Fuhrman, 1999; Balter, 2000; Rohwer, 2003). They were discovered independently by Twort (1915), who isolated them from Staphylococcus spp., and from patients with dysentery. D’Herelle (1926) described bacteriophage as a virus that has the capability to parasitize bacteria (Twort, 1915; Delbruck, 1942). Bacteriophages vary greatly in morphology and replicative characteristics, containing either RNA or DNA, being these parameters currently used by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) for bacteriophage classification (King et al., 2012; Table 1). However, the identification of bacteriophages is difficult since there are no universally conserved markers, unlike e.g., the bacterial 16S rRNA gene (Paul et al., 2002), with only minor parts of bacteriophage genomes being used to determine family specific makers, such as the viral capsid g20 of T4 (Fuller et al., 1998; Marston and Sallee, 2003; Sullivan et al., 2008).
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