Phage editing technology could lead to alternative treatments for antibiotic-resistant bacteria

As antibiotic resistance becomes an increasingly serious threat to our health, the scientific and medical communities are searching for new medicines to fight infections. Researchers at Gladstone Institutes have just moved closer to that goal with a novel technique for harnessing the power of bacteriophages.

Bacteriophages, or phages for short, are viruses that naturally take over and kill bacteria. Thousands of phages exist, but using them as treatments to fight specific bacteria has so far proven to be challenging. To optimize phage therapy and make it scalable to human disease, scientists need ways to engineer phages into efficient bacteria-killing machines. This would also offer an alternative way to treat bacterial infections that are resistant to standard antibiotics.

Now, Gladstone scientists have developed a technology that lets them edit the genomes of phages in a streamlined and highly effective way, giving them the ability to engineer new phages and study how the viruses can be used to target specific bacteria.

The new approach relies on molecules called retrons, which originate from bacterial immune systems and act like DNA-production factories inside bacterial cells. Shipman's team has found ways to program retrons so they make copies of a desired DNA sequence.

When phages infect a bacterial colony containing retrons, using the technique described in the team's new study, the phages integrate the retron-produced DNA sequences into their own genomes.

Image source: Michael Short/Gladstone Institutes.