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Phage therapy: should bacterial resistance to phages be a concern, even in the long run?
- Source :
- Bacteriophage. 3(e24219)
- Publication Year :
- 2013
-
Abstract
- Bacteriophage therapy, the use of viruses that infect bacteria as antimicrobials, has been championed as a promising alternative to conventional antibiotics. Although in the laboratory bacterial resistance against phages arises rapidly, resistance so far has been an only minor problem for the effectiveness of phage therapy. Resistance to antibiotics, however, has become a major issue after decades of extensive use. Should we expect similar problems after long-term use of phages as antimicrobials? Like antibiotics, phages are often noted to be drivers of bacterial evolution. Should we expect phage-treated pathogens to develop a general resistance to phages over time, a resistance against which only, for example, hypothetically co-evolved phages might be infective? Here we argue that the global infection patterns of phages suggest that this is not necessarily a concern as environmental phages often can infect bacteria with which those phages lack any recent co-evolutionary history.
- Subjects :
- 0303 health sciences
biology
Phage therapy
030306 microbiology
medicine.drug_class
viruses
medicine.medical_treatment
Antibiotics
ta1182
General Medicine
Antimicrobial
biology.organism_classification
ta3111
Microbiology
03 medical and health sciences
Antibiotic resistance
Bacteriophage Therapy
medicine
ta1181
Bacteria
030304 developmental biology
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 21597081
- Volume :
- 3
- Issue :
- e24219
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Bacteriophage
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....85254ef1df62b19571443e96ddcc59b4