A new weapon in the war against superbugs

A press release from the American Friends of Tel Aviv University: In the arms race between bacteria and modern medicine, bacteria have gained an edge. In recent decades, bacterial resistance to antibiotics has developed faster than the production of new antibiotics, making bacterial infections increasingly difficult to treat. Scientists worry that a particularly virulent and deadly "superbug" could one day join the ranks of existing untreatable bacteria, causing a public health catastrophe comparable with the Black Death.

Now research led by Dr. Udi Qimron of Tel Aviv University's Department of Clinical Microbiology and Immunology at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine has discovered a protein that kills bacteria. The isolation of this protein, produced by a virus that attacks bacteria, is a major step toward developing a substitute for conventional antibiotics. "To stay ahead of bacterial resistance, we have to keep developing new antibiotics," said Dr. Qimron. "What we found is a small protein that could serve as a powerful antibiotic in the future."

...Bacteriophages, often referred to as "phages," are viruses that infect and replicate in bacteria. Because they coevolved with bacteria, they are optimized to kill them. As proof of their endurance, phages are the most common life form on earth, outnumbering bacteria 10 to one. In places like the former Soviet Union, phages have been used to treat bacterial infections for the past hundred years. Harmless to humans, they inject their DNA into bacteria and rapidly replicate, killing their hosts.

...Dr. Qimron and his colleagues set out to understand how all 56 proteins found in T7, a particularly virulent phage that infects Escherichia coli bacteria, contribute to its functioning. They discovered that one of the proteins, called 0.4, impedes cell division in E. coli, causing the cells of the bacteria to elongate and then die. The protein is common to many bacteria and a similar process occurs in all bacteria, so the finding may have wide application.

...The major challenge for pharmaceutical companies will be figuring out how exactly to deliver the protein as a drug, said Dr. Qimron. In the meantime, he continues to hunt for other proteins that kill bacteria.

Bacteriophages shot by Mostafa Fatehi, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license