Slashdot Mirror
Anatomy of a Virus
Roland Piquepaille writes "No, I'm not talking about a computer virus here, but about a real one, the Epsilon 15, which attacks the bacterium Salmonella. By writing a few lines of computer code, biologists from Purdue University have found a way to control a high-resolution microscope. This allowed them to look inside a virus. While previous teams were able to visualize the highly symmetric outer shell of other viruses, these researchers were able to see the whole structure of Epsilon 15, including its tail, its genome and even its core. This better knowledge of viruses which attack bacteria could lead to great advances in medicine, especially when antibiotics become inefficient because of bacteria resisting them."
How long before scientists are going to try and create their own anti-bacterial virus, a la some Michael Crichton novel? From TFA: "We need a new way to attack bacteria once they mutate, and if we can employ phages to do our work for us, it could be a great advance for medicine."
What, me? Never.
There is a debate on whether or not virii can be considered a form of life... looking at this picture, I can't help but feel it is. Like a little bug with venom, it attacks our DNA instead of our nervous system.
1 voice in a sea of voices
Mod parent up. The discovery of antibiotics pushed phage research into the background which, I think, many biologists are realizing was a mistake. See Félix d'Herelle for more information.
No. Such phages have been used as a medical treatment in Russia and Eastern Europe for quite some time. There have been several popular press (Natl Geographic, SciAm, Discover) articles about the science behind them. They basically go out to a pond or other standing body of water, and bioassay the water to see what kills the bacteria they want killed. Then they try to reduce it to the active material (i.e., phage) that does it, and they go from there. It is suprisingly developed.
These are naturally occuring phages, not genetically engineered super bugs or whatnot. Of course, they are unpatentable in the US, so no one will research them here, although the patent would be unenforcable. "We go out to so-and-so pond, centrifuge the water, isolate phage EB517, dry it and package it into gelatin capsules". Well, just about any grad student could do the same thing.... No bioreactors required, etc.
The US way will be of course to identify a phage that attacks, say, E. Coli H:0157 (and ONLY Ec H:0157! There are too many other beneficial subtypes of E. coli in human guts that shouldn't be killed off...), and then try to do some genetic engineering to it to deliver not only the phage's package but also say a clusterbomb of penicillin or some other antibiotic, to make it "more effective". Then they could generalize from there and get a patent for using the phage for attacking E. Coli bacteria, or even for using phages as antibiotics in humans and livestock. That might get them around the lack of novelness of using phages against bacteria, which already happens in nature.