Bacteriophage Therapy against Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria

Abstract

Bacteriophages or phages are the most abundant microorganisms in our environment and present in high numbers in water and foods of various origins. They are cultured in their respective host bacteria using conventional microbiological procedures and typically have very specific host ranges restricted to one or a few bacterial species. Phages have been used in a variety of applications to exploit their exquisite host specificity, including use as indicators of the presence of their bacterial hosts and bacterial (manure) contamination. Typing phages have been widely used in identifying and classifying human bacterial pathogens. Phages offer potential for targeted biological control of bacterial pathogens in human, animal, and plant diseases. Phages can be conventionally classified into two categories according to the strategies they use to escape their hosts: filamentous and lytic phages. Filamentous phages continuously extrude from their hosts without causing host lysis, whereas all other phages are lytic phages that encode gene products to compromise or destroy the bacterial cell wall. The aim of this review is to consider the current evidence on the effects of bacteriophages for detection and control pathogens. The emergence of pathogenic bacteria resistant to most, if not all, currently available antimicrobial agents has become a critical problem in modern medicine, particularly because of the concomitant increase in immunosuppressed patients. The concern that humankind is reentering the “pre-antibiotics” era has become very real and the development of alternative anti-infection modalities has become one of the highest priorities of medicine and biotechnology.