The solution to antibiotic resistance could be in your kitchen sponge

Researchers from the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) have discovered bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, living in their kitchen sponges. As the threat of antibiotic resistance increases, bacteriophages, or phages for short, may prove useful in fighting bacteria that cannot be killed by antibiotics alone. The research is presented at ASM Microbe, the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.

A kitchen sponge is exposed to all kinds of different microbes, which form a vast microbiome of bacteria. Phages are the most abundant biological particles on the planet and are typically found wherever bacteria reside. With this understanding, kitchen sponges seemed a likely place to find them.

Students in a research class isolated bacteria from their own used kitchen sponges and then used the bacteria as bait to find phages that could attack it. Two students successfully discovered phages that infect bacteria living in their kitchen sponges. "Our study illustrates the value in searching any microbial environment that could harbor potentially useful phages," said Brianna Weiss, a Life Sciences student at New York Institute of Technology.

"Continuing our work, we hope to isolate and characterize more phages that can infect bacteria from a variety of microbial ecosystems, where some of these phages might be used to treat antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections."