Abstract
A new way to alter the genome of bacteriophages helps produce large libraries of variants, allowing these bacteria-killing viruses to be designed to target species harmful to human health.
Main text
Antibiotics are usually quite effective at killing bacteria that cause disease, but they often end up eliminating huge swaths of microorganisms beneficial to health . Limiting this collateral damage by solely targeting pathogenic bacteria remains challenging, as only slight differences separate harmful and beneficial bacterial species.
An alternative treatment to chemical antibiotics could be to harness viruses called bacteriophages (or phages), which have evolved to recognize and prey on highly specific strains of bacteria (Abedon et al., 2011). Yet engineering phages to target harmful bacterial species requires scalable genetic tools that can precisely alter the genomes of these viruses. Now, in eLife, Srivatsan Raman and colleagues at University of Wisconsin-Madison – including Phil Huss as first author – report a new method that can create thousands of mutations in a host-specifying phage protein, showing how these changes alter which bacteria the virus can target (Huss et al., 2021).