Researchers have discovered that viruses that infect bacteria generally found in the kitchen sponges may prove useful in beating antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Fighting drug-resistant bacteria is one of the biggest challenges mankind has to face in the near future.
A sponge wipe material used in the kitchen houses all kinds of different microbes, which form a vast microbiome of bacteria. Bacteriophages are the most abundant biological particles on the planet and are typically found in wherever bacteria reside. So kitchen sponges seemed a likely place to find them.
Research students at New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) in Old Westbury, New York have isolated bacteria from their own used kitchen sponges and then used the bacteria as bait to find the 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 NYIT.
The researchers experimented with swapping these two phages and observed if they could cross-infect the other person's isolated bacteria. Consequently, the phages did kill the other's bacteria. "This led us to wonder if the bacteria strains were coincidentally the same, even though they came from two different sponges," said Weiss.
The DNA of both isolated strains of bacteria belonged to Enterobacteriaceae family, which are rod-shaped group of microbes commonly found in feces. Although these two strains are closely linked, when performing biochemical testing they were found to have chemical variations between them.
"These differences are important in understanding the range of bacteria that a phage can infect, which is also key to determining its ability to treat specific antibiotic-resistant infections," said Weiss.
"Continuing our work, we hope to isolate and characterise 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," Weiss said.
This study was presented at ASM Microbe, the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.
