Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Credit: CDC
Key points:
- During the pandemic, students found five new virus species in creeks around their university.
- One virus can attack and kill the highly antibiotic-resistant bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
- Th team believes there are more species to be found, giving more weight to the possible use of bacteriophages as the antibiotic resistance crisis continues to grow.
COVID-19 may have driven Clare Kirkpatrick’s students out of the lab, but they didn’t let that stop their research. Instead of studying microbes in the lab, they went on field trips to local creeks to see if they could find any interesting microbes.
To their surprise, the students found not only interesting microbes, but new ones. In fact, they identified five potentially new species.
As described in Microbiology Resource Announcements, the team from the University of Southern Denmark recently sequenced the genome of one of the five new species, naming it Fyn8.
Many viruses are bacteriophages, meaning that they kill bacteria, and Fyn8 is no exception. The researchers discovered that Fyn8 can attack and kill the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Highly antibiotic resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa is common in hospitals, where it infects burn patients and patients on ventilators.
“We could see it with the naked eye: Clear holes appeared in the layer of Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria in our petri dishes, where Fyn8 had infected the bacterial cells, killed them, multiplied and proceeded to attack the next,” said Kirkpatrick, associate professor in the department of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Southern Denmark.
While phages were discovered at the beginning of the 20th century, they are under-researched as antibiotics became the go-to cure for infections. And for good reason—antibiotics were easy to produce and easy to use, while phages were difficult to isolate and give to patients. Additionally, an antibiotic dose could kill many different bacteria, while a phage only matches with a single bacterial species. However, as both antibiotic-resistance and technology grow, phages may could become a popular treatment.
The research team will be sequencing the remaining four species they discovered, and Kirkpatrick believes there are even more new virus species in the local creeks.