Viruses that Can Fight Bacteria?!

  Scientists have already studied and tested viruses to eat bacteria, however, targeting specific bacteria is takes time and is costly. According to Timothy Lu from MIT, he and his team have created a new system that can swap genes in order to customize viruses to eat any pathogenic bacteria. Lu says, "These bacteriophages are designed in a way that's relatively modular. You can take genes and swap them in and out and get a functional phage that has new properties."
   One goal of this new system is to assist in killing bacteria that do not have any effective antibiotics. Another is to perhaps assist in other human functions like digestion. In the human digestive tract, there is bacteria to help with digestion but also others causing disease, the they hope to see some "edits" in the bacteria to keep the disease causing bacteria to a minimum so that the use of antibiotics is reduced. Antibiotics can not specify which bacteria are to be removed, resulting in targeting both the friendly and disease causing bacteria.
  For the study, the team chose a bacteriophage T7 that attacks Escherichia coli. The phage is made up of a head and a tail, the tail is what attacks the target. The team substituted genes in the tail of T7 that resulted in a phage that could target a several different types of bacteria.  The team believes they have created a more simple and quick process through this. The researches were able to redesign the tail of T7 by researching new sequences that are similar for the tail of T7. Once the structures were found, swapping them out was not as labor induced as they had thought. They also found that putting the genome into a yeast cell made it easier for the gene-swap.
   The MIT team showed that their study could help changed phages to specifically attack strains of Gram-negative bacteria, which has few antibiotics against it. 
  David Bikard from the Institut Pasteur in Paris says, "This is a big step in the development of phage therapies with predictable outcomes and a good demonstration of what synthetic biology approaches will bring to medicine in the near future."
I think this article was interesting in the fact that we can use viruses, which we all hates, to fight bacteria, another thing we all hate (mostly). I'm looking forward to see what advantages that will bring us in the future and how it can better our health. 

  
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