Identifying Characteristics of Bacteriophages Isolated from Sewage Found to Infect Bacteria Citrobacter freundii
Student Presenter(s): Natalia Reynisdottir
Faculty Mentor: Bryan Gibb
Department: Life Sciences
School/College: College of Arts and Sciences, Long Island
Rapidly growing antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in bacteria is reducing the effectiveness of current treatments for microbial infections. At the current pace, by 2050, more people may die annually from AMR bacterial infections, than from cancer. Finding an alternative therapy to antibiotics, therefore, remains one of the largest public health challenges. Phage therapy uses bacteriophages (phages), viruses that infect bacteria, to treat bacterial infections. The practice has been around for almost a century but has only recently gained attention from western medicine. Citrobacter freundii is a commonly encountered microbe that typically causes treatable opportunistic infections, but recently, strains with AMR have proven more challenging to treat, and hence a good target for phage therapy. We have isolated, purified and studied two separate phages that essentially infect the same bacteria, C. freundii. So far, we have learned these Citrobacter phages are extremely lytic members of the myoviridae family and have some differences in their genome properties. Further characterization will explore the genomes of these two phages, test host specificity against other related bacteria, including other strains of C. freundii. We will continue exploring the phage-host relationship and aim to start testing the phages against clinical isolates of C. freundii, some of which may contain AMR, in an effort to evaluate their potential for future phage therapy applications.