Ando Hiroki
Department of Microbiology, Graduate School of Medicine, Gifu University.
Nihon Saikingaku Zasshi. 2018;73(4):201-210. doi: 10.3412/jsb.73.201.
Bacteria are closely related with human health and diseases. For example, the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria is a serious problem in the world. Studying the human microbiome shows its important role for our health. But we have very limited tools to edit bacterial population. Antibiotics are generally broad-spectrum and unable to kill only bad bacteria. The natural enemies of bacteria, called bacteriophage (phage), have highly specific host range, and thus promising candidates for targeted bacterial population editing. However, isolation and characterization of natural phages can be a time-, labor- and cost-intensive way. Also, developing phage-based therapeutics and diagnostics is limited by the difficulty of engineering phages. Here, I describe a phage genome-engineering platform and synthetic phages with tunable host ranges to overcome these challenges.
细菌与人类健康和疾病密切相关。例如，耐药细菌的出现是全球一个严重问题。对人类微生物组的研究显示了其对我们健康的重要作用。但我们用于编辑细菌群体的工具非常有限。抗生素通常是广谱的，无法只杀死有害细菌。细菌的天敌——噬菌体，具有高度特异性的宿主范围，因此有望成为靶向编辑细菌群体的候选者。然而，天然噬菌体的分离和表征可能是一个耗时、费力且成本高昂的过程。此外，基于噬菌体的治疗和诊断的开发受到噬菌体工程改造难度的限制。在此，我描述了一个噬菌体基因组工程平台以及具有可调节宿主范围的合成噬菌体，以克服这些挑战。
