Balance of nature: necessary viruses like bacteriophages (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, August 12, 2023, 22:45 (468 days ago) @ David Turell

Their job is to kill bacteria:

https://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/library/item/11_august_2023/4123...

"Journalist Tom Ireland’s The Good Virus, which recounts the intriguing history of a different type of antibiotic principle, a process by which viruses known as bacteriophages or phages destroy bacteria, is thus incredibly timely for its potential to renew interest in an orthogonal antimicrobial modality.

"First indirectly observed in 1915 by the English physician Frederick Twort, bacteriophages are composed of a piece of DNA wrapped in a protein capsule. Their genetic instructions are entirely reliant on the hardware of their bacterial hosts, which perform all the phage’s metabolic and replicative functions. Ireland recounts how these ruthless predators penetrate bacteria “like pins in a voodoo doll,” forming conduits through which they inject their genes at high pressure. When they trigger their own replication and self-assembly, bacteriophages obliterate their hapless hosts.

"The antimicrobial properties of bacteriophages were first documented in 1896 by the Cambridge naturalist Ernest Hanbury Hankin, who traveled to India to investigate reports that outbreaks of cholera upstream of the river Ganges often did not spread downstream. There, he noted that “the unboiled water of the Ganges kills the cholera germ in less than three hours”. It was subsequently shown that the bacterial profusion swirling around the Ganges is accompanied by an abundance of bacteriophages."

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"Although, to date, there are still no definitive randomized clinical study data demonstrating the efficacy of bacteriophage therapy, there is sufficient reason to believe that bespoke bacteriophage treatments targeting individual strains could be successfully developed and deployed on a global scale. A “universal” antimicrobial system of this sort might comprise large, automated libraries of therapeutic phages or the point-of-care de novo synthesis of natural and artificial bacteriophages (4) using sequence databases, synthetic genomics, and generative artificial intelligence. The astonishing prevalence of bacteriophages, which outnumber bacteria by at least 10 to 1, provides an almost limitless supply of genetic information for this purpose."

Comment: another theodicy issue in this subject. God made bacteriophages, which don't harm us, to help us control bacterial harm. What is our problem? We have the brains He gave us to solve this issue. We were mesmerized by penicillin, Streptomycin, etc. from molds. This was commercialized with no thought to bacteriophage production. Finally, faced with bacterial resistance growing to critically high levels over the past 40 years, this step offered by God, must be followed.