In a modern take on the Victorian gold rush, a Monash University-led project is successfully ‘bioprospecting’ for viruses known as phages that can kill deadly superbugs. The Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute (BDI) team, led by Dr. Rhys Dunstan and Professor Trevor Lithgow of the Bacterial Cell Biology Laboratory, has had some success in tracking down the elusive killers.
Published in Cell Reports, their research sheds new light on how phages can select a ‘superbug’ bacterium that they will kill while ignoring other bacteria that are good for our health. The findings could lead to an improvement in how individual phages are chosen to treat bacterial infections resistant to antibiotics.
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