Shepherd microbes vs. Wolf microbes
The bacterium-weapon will help to cope with a bacterial infection
Kirill Stasevich, CompulentaPathogenic bacteria can be dealt with using...
other bacteria, as researchers from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore did, providing the usual Escherichia coli with a weapon against Pseudomonas aeruginosa Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
The weapon in this case is an antibacterial toxin, and earlier Matthew Chan and his colleagues had already created E.coli, which synthesized the antibacterial peptide piocin and exploded when approaching the enemy. The explosion occurred when the E. coli felt the chemical signals of another bacterium.
Figure from the article by Saeidi et al. Engineering microbes to sense and eradicate Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a human pathogen – VMIn a new paper published in ACS Synthetic Biology (Hwang et al., Reprogramming microbes to be a pathogen-seeking killer), scientists describe modifications and improvements to their method.
This time they provided the E. coli with the microcin S gene, which is smaller than pyocin, and the bacterium can secrete it without resorting to suicidal destruction. And this means that in the fight against the pathogen, you can do with less forces – because E.coli are no longer disposable.
In addition, the modified E. coli also isolated the enzyme DNase I, which destroyed the protective biofilm of P.aeruginosa consisting of DNA.
E.coli sensed the chemical signals by which P.aeruginosa estimated the density of its own population. That is, simply put, E.coli eavesdropped on the enemy's negotiations. In the E. coli themselves, a special protein interacted with the signaling molecules of P.aeruginosa, and after that the resulting complex began preparing weapons for attack. In addition, the P.aeruginosa signaling molecule in combination with the E.coli protein induced E.coli to move in the direction of a greater concentration of signaling molecules, to the places of maximum accumulation of the enemy.
The system was tested on mice infected with P.aeruginosa, and the animals really got rid of the pathogen.
This method of destroying an infection has the following advantage over conventional antibiotics: a bacterium-weapon can be set up against a certain enemy, whereas antibiotics mow down all bacteria, and this can be very inappropriate in the case of, for example, intestinal microflora.
It is also worth noting that this is not the first work in which they are trying to use bacteria to fight other diseases: not so long ago there was a message that scientists had found a way to destroy cancer metastases with the help of radioactive bacteria.
Prepared based on Nature News: Engineered bacterium hunts down pathogens.
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