A Research Study On Antibacterial Therapy

6. Humans should not be concerned about the bacteriophages infecting other cells because each bacteriophage is particular to a certain bacteria. If the bacterial cell exhibits traits that are desirable to the certain bacteriophage, then the phage will chose to bind and infect it, otherwise people have nothing to worry about.

It is often argued whether viruses are living or not. Those who don’t believe that viruses are living generally base their opinion off of the fact that they do not follow the basic definition of “life”. They do not carry out life-sustaining functions on their own like normal organisms. On the other side of the argument, some believe that viruses are in fact, living beings, which is where I rest my opinion.

Some phages infect bacteria to destroy them, which is called lysic lifestyle, while other phages infect bacteria and stay dormant inside them for a while, which is referred to as a lysogenic lifestyle. A phage infects the bacteria cell by injecting its genetic material into the bacteria’s cytoplasm. This allows the bacteria synthesis process to start making the phage’s genetic code instead of its own. Once the bacteria have made enough phages to handle, the walls will break and release all of the phage that was created. The phages that were made are now resetting the process and beginning again by infecting the other near bacteria by injecting their genetic material once again. Those phages that stay within the bacteria and not burst the bacteria will continue to reproduce the phages own genetic code. (Griffiths,

The titer of recombinant phage was determined with the number of plaques on the E.coli K plates and the titer of total phage progeny was determined with the number of plaque on the E.coli B plates.

Titer of the Bacterial virus, the Measurement of the Recombination and the Reversion Rate, and the Gene Map Distance (Phage Recombination)

Bacteriophages were first discovered about 100 years ago by Frederick Twort and Felix D'Herelle. Bacteriophages or commonly known as “phages” are viruses that infect bacterial hosts. Bacteriophages come in multiple shapes and sizes. But a good amount of them are tailed viruses that contain double stranded DNA. The head of the bacteriophages has a protein shell which is attached to the tail. Some phages differ as some don’t have double stranded DNA they may be single stranded. Phages are incapable of reproducing on their own. In fact, they need a bacterial host to reproduce. Like any virus, bacteriophages are very fixed to discrete hosts. The host bacteria that we are using is called arthrobacter. Arthrobacter is a genus of bacteria found in soil (Pope et al 2016). Arthrobacter can help reduce hexavalent chromium which can cause some symptoms such as irritations to humans. Hexavalent chromium may also cause lung cancer if inhaled. The SEA PHAGE project was broken down into two parts. The first part which we are currently doing is isolating, purifying and amplifying the bacteria from our soil samples that we collected in the beginning of the year.

The main objectives of this experiment included making dilutions of solutions, plating phage or bacteria, and determining the number of bacterial viruses or phage in a suspension. It was also conducted to demonstrate that two different mutants of phage T4 can exchange genetic material to give rise to wild-type phage. The experiment was used to distinguish mutants from wild-type by their host specificity. The recombination in bacteriophage was performed to determine the concentration of unadsorbed phage from the U series plates, total concentration from B series, and concentration of

Given the fact that Mr BT is allergic to penicillins, is cephalexin therapy contraindicated here?

Using FinchTV, it was determined that each sequence had only one Sal I digest site, suggesting that each clone was not the full length of the inserted fragment. However, this was not a problem because of the two primers that were inserted as a pre-emptive solution for this instance. All four clone fragments also matched to the phage Urkel, with 98-99% certainty (NCBI and PhagesDB). Using PhagesDB, Urkel was found to be K1 cluster phage. When a BlastX search was performed using NCBI, the first clone fragment did not match to any known functions. However, the second clone fragment matched to having a minor tail protein from the T3 fragment and a tape measure protein from the T7 fragment, both of which were to the phage SamuelLPlaqson (NCBI). This suggested that this fragment had remnants of both genes. In an effort to explain these results, the previously annotated phage genome of Phrank was analyzed. Phrank’s genome revealed that the tape measure protein often precedes the minor tail protein by merely a few base pairs. Using this information, this fragment was confirmed to have partial genes of both the minor tail protein and the tape measure protein; the NCBI BlastX results were different for the two primers because the search was showing the most likely match given the length of the respective fragments. Due to Zassy’s high

Each batch of phage was used to infect a different culture of bacteria. After infection had taken place, each culture was whirled in a blender, removing any remaining phage and phage parts from the outside of the bacterial cells. Finally, the cultures were centrifuged, or spun at high speeds, to separate the bacteria from the phage debris.

A current predicament in the field of science is antibiotic resistance against superbugs.Though fighting against superbugs; which can be defined as a strain of bacteria unable to be killed using multiple antibiotics, is now a large problem, in the past it was not. The evolution of resistance in bacteria due to antibiotic abuse and lack of product development has brought upon us once again the fear of a pre-antibiotic era; one where simple, once easily defeated infections could kill. Already, infectious diseases are the 3rd leading cause of death in the US and the 2nd across the entire world, and drug resistant superbugs send 2 million Americans to hospitals every year; killing 23,000 of those people. And any bacterium can quickly and easily become multidrug resistant, the leading cause of this being antibiotic misuse in both humans and animals.( "Clinical Infectious Diseases." The Epidemic of Antibiotic-Resistant Infections: A Call to Action for the Medical Community from the Infectious Diseases Society of America. UCLA Medical School. Web. 27 Mar. 2016.)

According to “Injected Bacteria Shrink Tumors in Rats, Dogs and Humans” (2015) a bacterium normally found in oxygen poor soil has been genetically modified to be target specific to a tumor that has oxygen starved cells. Once introduced to a person, these microorganisms can replicate and inhibit their growth and destroy it. In one study, three live tissue models had “complete eradication of their tumors” while in the other three, the tumor “shrunk by at least 30%.” There are also experiments to use bacteria to treat other diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disorder that causes the body to attack the joints. In addition, viruses can be used to treat diseases. It’s interesting to think you can take a virus to destroy a bacterium. In fact, there are naturally occurring viruses called bacteriophages, meaning eats bacteria, which attack them. This was discovered before the discovery of antibiotics, but bacteriophages initially were not successful. Soon antibiotics became the tool of choice and bacteriophages became a disregarded avenue to fight bacteria. Unfortunately, the emergence of multi-resistant bacteria is a growing concern because the surviving bacteria have learned to protect itself from it. As a result, scientists are revisiting studies to treat bacteria infections with

A new discovery that rivals the original idea that bacterial viruses only steal DNA from bacteria was found early this year in a virus called the “WO virus”, which carries the gene that codes for the poison of a black widow spider. The poison is named “latrotoxin”, which is a toxin that can break down a eukaryotes cell membrane. Researchers believe that the “WO virus pinched the gene for “latrotoxin” to be able to penetrate through animal cells. This article is very interesting because it shows how bacteria and virus evolve every day and adapt to new environments to survive.

Lab number 6 was a success. The Phages were isolated nicely. The only negative in the results was that they were not easily seen or transparent in the light. The plaques were isolated, large, and opaque. One plate had an isolated Phage with some small and white contaminates near the Phage. The second Agar plate did not have contaminates, but as stated before, the plaques weren’t transparent circles. The large plaques were faded.

The main objective of this experiment is to investigate the effect of different types of antibiotics on bacteria Bacillus subtilis and Escherichia coli. Some of the main methods used in this experiment