Bacteriophage - Mediated Micro Biome Manipulation: A Novel Venture in Fostering Infant Gut Health

Abstract

The incidence of Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) has been growing globally, posing threat to medical practice. Around this instance, environmental enteropathy remains one of the major causes of infant mortality. In the past few decades, great efforts have been laid to foster gut health. Efforts have been focused on understanding the role of exogenous factors such as sanitation, exclusive breast feeding, consumption of probiotic nutrition, etc. Antibiotics, while treating the disease successfully, diminishes the gut micro biome and possess the threat of developing resistance. A complementary way of enhance gut health is to build a healthy gut micro biome environment which requires a great insight in understanding the host-microbiome interactions. Precise engineering of bacteriophages to develop novel models to understand, describe, probe and modify gut function by building a healthy micro biome environment will yield decade's worth progress in the field of biotechnology. The objective of this article is to introduce the hypothesis of tuning gut microbiota using bacterio- phages and to familiarize the physiology of a bacteriophage, to elaborate its current implications, challenges faced on its application, future scope and to motivate new researchers to bring out novel strategies to mitigate the burden and spread of Environmental Enteric Dysfunction (EED) by establishing a healthy micro biome using bacteriophage- mediated micro biome engineering which proves complementary to nutritional and chemotherapeutic approaches.