Department of Genetics, Institute for Integrative Systems Biology, I2SysBio, Universitat de València, Universitat de València-CSIC, 46980 Paterna, Spain.
Institute for Integrative Systems Biology, I2SysBio, FISABIO-Salud Pública, Generalitat Valenciana, Universitat de València-CSIC, 46980 Paterna, Spain.
Int J Mol Sci. 2020 Jan 9;21(2):425. doi: 10.3390/ijms21020425.
The emergence of multi-drug-resistant bacteria represents a major public-health threat. Phages constitute a promising alternative to chemical antibiotics due to their high host specificity, abundance in nature, and evolvability. However, phage host specificity means that highly diverse bacterial species are particularly difficult to target for phage therapy. This is the case of , which presents a hypervariable extracellular matrix capsule exhibiting dozens of variants. Here, we report four novel phages infecting capsular type K22 which were isolated from environmental samples in Valencia, Spain. Full genome sequencing showed that these phages belong to the family and encode putative depolymerases that allow digestion of specific K22 capsules. Our results confirm the capsular type-specificity of phages, as indicated by their narrow infectivity in a panel of clinical isolates. Nonetheless, this work represents a step forward in the characterization of phage diversity, which may culminate in the future use of large panels of phages for typing and/or for combating multi-drug-resistant
耐药菌的出现对公共卫生构成了重大威胁。噬菌体作为化学抗生素的替代品具有广阔的前景，这是因为它们具有高度的宿主特异性、在自然界中丰富存在以及可进化性。然而，噬菌体的宿主特异性意味着高度多样化的细菌物种特别难以成为噬菌体治疗的目标。这就是 菌的情况，它具有表现出数十种变体的高度可变性细胞外基质囊。在这里，我们报告了从西班牙瓦伦西亚的环境样本中分离到的四种新型噬菌体，它们可感染荚膜型 K22 的噬菌体。全基因组测序表明，这些噬菌体属于 科，并编码假定的解聚酶，可消化特定的 K22 囊。我们的研究结果证实了 噬菌体的荚膜型特异性，这表明它们在一组临床分离株中的感染性较窄。尽管如此，这项工作代表了在噬菌体多样性的特征描述方面向前迈进了一步，这可能最终会导致未来使用大量的噬菌体进行分型和/或对抗多药耐药性。
