Department of Microbial, Biochemical and Food Biotechnology, University of the Free State, P.O. Box 399, Bloemfontein, 9300, South Africa,
Adv Exp Med Biol. 2014;807:97-110. doi: 10.1007/978-81-322-1777-0_7.
The world is facing an ever-increasing problem with antibiotic resistant bacteria and we are rapidly heading for a post-antibiotic era. There is an urgent need to investigate alterative treatment options while there are still a few antibiotics left. Bacteriophages are viruses that specifically target bacteria. Before the development of antibiotics, some efforts were made to use bacteriophages as a treatment option, but most of this research stopped soon after the discovery of antibiotics. There are two different replication options which bacteriophages employ. These are the lytic and lysogenic life cycles. Both these life cycles have potential as treatment options. There are various advantages and disadvantages to the use of bacteriophages as treatment options. The main advantage is the specificity of bacteriophages and treatments can be designed to specifically target pathogenic bacteria while not negatively affecting the normal microbiota. There are various advantages to this. However, the high level of specificity also creates potential problems, the main being the requirement of highly specific diagnostic procedures. Another potential problem with phage therapy includes the development of immunity and limitations with the registration of phage therapy options. The latter is driving research toward the expression of phage genes which break the bacterial cell wall, which could then be used as a treatment option. Various aspects of phage therapy have been investigated in studies undertaken by our research group. We have investigated specificity of phages to various avian pathogenic E. coli isolates. Furthermore, the exciting NanoSAM technology has been employed to investigate bacteriophage replication and aspects of this will be discussed.
世界正面临着抗生素耐药菌日益严重的问题，我们正迅速走向后抗生素时代。在抗生素还剩下几种的时候，迫切需要研究替代治疗方案。噬菌体是专门针对细菌的病毒。在抗生素开发之前，曾有人尝试将噬菌体作为一种治疗方法，但在抗生素发现后不久，这项研究大多就停止了。噬菌体有两种不同的复制方式。分别是裂解和溶源周期。这两种生命周期都有可能成为治疗方案。噬菌体作为治疗方法有各种优缺点。噬菌体的主要优点是特异性，因此可以设计治疗方法来专门针对致病菌，而不会对正常微生物群产生负面影响。这有很多好处。然而，高度的特异性也带来了潜在的问题，主要是需要高度特异性的诊断程序。噬菌体治疗的另一个潜在问题包括免疫的发展和噬菌体治疗选择的注册限制。后者促使研究转向表达可以打破细菌细胞壁的噬菌体基因，然后可以将其作为治疗选择。我们的研究小组已经在研究中研究了噬菌体治疗的各个方面。我们研究了噬菌体对各种禽致病性大肠杆菌分离株的特异性。此外，还采用了令人兴奋的 NanoSAM 技术来研究噬菌体的复制，其中的一些方面将进行讨论。
