Inside Science
Outbreaks of foodborne diseases carried by bacteria can be a nuisance at best, and deadly at worst. Researchers are looking into novel ways to keep food safe. One way to destroy these pathogens is with more pathogens.
Bacteriophages are viruses that specifically attack bacteria. These phages, as researchers call them, have evolved alongside bacteria and become very good at what they do.
Scientists are most interested in lytic phages – viruses that inject their DNA into a bacterium and then hijack the cell’s machinery to make new copies of the virus. The copies eventually burst through bacterium’s membrane, killing it, and attack neighboring cells.
Recently, a team of researchers at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana developed a cocktail of different phages that was extremely effective against Escherichia coli O157:H7, the pathogen that was estimated to have caused more than 63,000 illnesses and 2,138 hospitalizations between 2000 and 2008 in the U.S.
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