Treating Bacterial Diseases

[pdq1]

With Bacteria becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics is the future in Bacteriaphages to treat disease?

[LazyGun]

Been watching Horizon pdq? :)

Wiki has a nice intro article on phage therapy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy

I think more widespread acceptance in food and agriculture will probably happen before widespread therapeutic human applications....

[Peter Pedant]

Lot of interest in this in the thirties

1930s that is

gives you an excuse to read alll those back issues of Lancet and BMJ.
The whole of the BMJ is on the internet, by the way

[pdq1]

Lazygun and PP yes it did trigger my interest. Seeing those phages attack the bacteria, breeding once inside and like a scene from Aliens burst out whilst killing the bacteria.

Some years ago When Dr Sanger (who gained two nobel prizes for genetics) deciphered the genetic code for a phage. The code was published in Nature. The code was comprised of nearly 7000 nucleotides and within the code had eight genes only. The beauty of this code was that genes overlapped so that one gene started before the previous one had finished. Non gene coding was then called junk DNA but as we learnt last week that is the area where the switches are that turn the genes on and off.

So you can see where my interest in this subject lies.