Host: Jeff Fox with special guest, Timothy Lu.

Lu, an Associate Professor of Biological Engineering and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, talks with Jeff Fox about efforts to develop new phage varieties, swapping in phage tail genes that enable them to target specific bacterial pathogens, including those carrying virulence or antibiotic resistance factors.

Lu and other members of the MIT team worked with T7 phages that ordinarily act only against Escherichia coli. However, by substituting genes from other phages for the T7 gp17 gene, engineering them to target other bacteria, including pathogens such as Yersinia and Klebsiella. “We used this technology to redirect E. coli phage scaffolds to target pathogenic Yersinia and Klebsiella bacteria, and conversely, Klebsiella phage scaffolds to target E. coli by modular swapping of phage tail components,” Lu says. Phages also can be used to speed diagnostic testing of clinical as well as environmental and food pathogens, and such diagnostic tools might be needed to optimize the use of narrow-range antimicrobial products that target very specific bacterial pathogens , he points out.

This story was featured in the January 2016 issue of Microbe Magazine.

Subscribe to MMP (free) on iTunes, Stitcher, Android, RSS, or by email. You can also listen on your mobile device with the Microbeworld app.

Send your microbiology questions and comments (email or audio file) to [email protected].