The friendly virus
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What is antibiotic resistance and why is it a growing concern?
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Autoliitto auttaa. Mökillä, tien päällä, lofoteilla. Autoliitto auttaa. Jäätölö sulaa. Nuolaisen ennen kuin tipahtaa. Jos mutkia matkassa, Autoliitto auttaa. Missä ja milloin vain.
Liity plus jäseneksi autoliitto.fi Tapahtuipa kerran, että pessimisti, optimisti ja saletisti grillasivat. Ja niinhän siinä kävi, että saletisti onnistui.
Saletisti onnistuu
What does snow leopard poo have to do with the biggest challenge facing modern medicine? According to some scientists, we're about to meet potentially quite a lot. The connection is our ability to harness the tiniest, most plentiful, almost living things on the planet, bacteriophages. Before we go back to the zoo, I think we need a little more on these tiny phages. What are they? Well, they're viruses. And if I were to look at some with an electron microscope, I'd see a curious menagerie of structures. Imagine the six legs of an insect with something a bit like a bolt screwed on the top of it. Or angular squids. These are bacteria killers. The word phage means to eat or consume in Greek, and bacteriophages are picky predators, infecting and attacking specific strains of bacteria, often unpleasant bacteria like E. coli or MRSA.
You can think of them as our enemy's enemy, the friendly viruses. They have the potential to be our superpower in the battle being fought in every hospital in every country on earth against antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. There is nothing else that's scalable. We need antibiotics for everything we do in medicine. So it's a problem that desperately needs to be addressed before we're just returned to the dark ages. We've known about phages for more than 100 years, yet there are no licensed products available in the UK. There is, however, a buzz about phages right now. Only last year, the UK Health Security Agency said, phage therapy truly has the potential to transform the way we treat bacterial infections.
So what's stopping us? How close are we to using phages? The search for answers takes me back to Dudley Zoo on a cold but sunny spring morning. I'm Martha Clokey. I'm a professor of microbiology and the co-director of the Vecumare Centre for Phage Research at the University of Leicester. Why are we at Dudley Zoo? We are collecting poo samples from the animals because we know that that's a really good source of bacteriophages. So we're stood outside the snow leopard's enclosure. Why is snow leopard poo interesting? Well, we sampled around about 80 different animal species. And the snow leopards, the cats in general, but particularly the snow leopards, we got the most number and the highest diversity of pages from those snow leopard samples.
So what poo are we going to collect today? I believe we are just off now to go to the giraffe enclosure to see what they have produced. I'm Emily, and I'm an ungulate keeper here. And we're stood next to the giraffes.
What are bacteriophages and how do they work?
Can you point them out to me? Yeah, of course. So over on the right here, we've got Kira, who's our younger one. And then on the left-hand side here, we've got Josie Mum, who is 17. They are a pretty pair. Thank you. All right, we're heading into the giraffe enclosure. Man with a bucket. Oh, bucket of poop. We have got a range in here, I believe. We've got a bit of Kira and a bit of Josie, because there are some smaller and larger ones in here. Martha, bacteriophages are everywhere, but why is there particular diversity interest in poo? Most of the abundance of our guts and the guts of animals is bacteria. What most people don't know is that those bacteria are being manipulated by bacteriophages. in different animals.
The phages and bacteria have evolved with time. They've gone over their own sort of micro battles, as it were. So we can specifically see if there are phages associated with different animals that have got good features that might be useful for us in different ways. So phages are everywhere, but particularly wherever the bacteria they attack are found. Sewage water has proven a good source, but so are all animals' gut microbiomes.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is antibiotic resistance and why is it a growing concern?
0:00–3:37
2
What are bacteriophages and how do they work?
3:37–10:58
3
Why is there renewed interest in phage therapy?
10:58–14:40
4
How are scientists collecting bacteriophages from animal waste?
14:40–25:00
5
What challenges do phage therapies face in clinical settings?
25:00–27:51