Balance of nature: bacteria use bacteriophages in warfare (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, June 14, 2024, 02:06 (162 days ago) @ David Turell

From a new study:

https://phys.org/news/2024-06-reveals-pathogens-repurpose-phage-elements.html

"New research led by the University of Utah and University College London (UCL) has found that plant bacterial pathogens are able to repurpose elements of their own bacteriophages, or phages, to wipe out competing microbes.

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"Titled "A phage tail–like bacteriocin suppresses competitors in metapopulations of pathogenic bacteria," the study was published in Science.

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"For its prior research, the lab looked at how a particular bacterial pathogen, Pseudomonas viridiflava, manifests in agricultural and wild settings. On cultivated land, they found, one variant would spread broadly in a crop field and become the dominant microbe present. But that was not the case on uncultivated land, prompting Karasov to find out why.

"'We see that no single lineage of bacteria can dominate. We wondered whether the phages, the pathogens of our bacterial pathogens, could prevent single lineages from spreading—maybe phages were killing some strains and not others. That's where our study started, but that's not where it ended up," Karasov said.

"'We looked in the genomes of plant bacterial pathogens to see which phages were infecting them. But it wasn't the phage we found that was interesting. The bacteria had taken a phage and repurposed it for warfare with other bacteria, now using it to kill competing bacteria."

"According to her study, the pathogen acquires elements of the phages in the form of non-self-replicating clusters of repurposed phage called tailocins, which penetrate the outer membranes of other pathogens and kill them.

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"'We discovered that all the historical tailocins were present in our present-day dataset, suggesting that evolution has maintained the diversity of tailocin variants over the century-scale," he said. "This likely indicates a finite set of possible resistance/sensitivity mechanisms within our studied bacterial population.

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"'While tailocins have been found previously in other bacterial genomes, and have been studied in lab settings, their impact and evolution in wild bacterial populations was not known. The fact that we found that these wild plant pathogens all have tailocins and these tailocins are evolving to kill neighboring bacteria shows how significant they may be in nature."

"Like most pesticides, many of our antibiotics were developed decades ago to kill a broad array of harmful organisms, ones that are both harmful and beneficial to human and plant health. Tailocins on the other hand, have greater specificity than most modern antibiotics, killing only a select few strains of bacteria, suggesting they could be deployed without laying waste to entire biological communities.

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"'We as a society have, in how we treat both pests in agriculture and bacterial pathogens in humans, used uniform and broad-spectrum treatments. The specificity of tailocin killing is a way that you could imagine doing more finely tailored treatments.'"

Comment: We are in trouble with antibiotics not working as they did previously. Look into nature and find something new is what we do. God designs what we need if we look for it.