Set a bug to kill a bug
By Marian Turner,
Nature News
| 08. 16. 2011
Engineered bacteria that can detect and kill human pathogens could provide a new way to treat antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Using the tools of synthetic biology, researchers have given bacteria therapeutic properties unseen in any natural strain — although they won't be injected into people any time soon.
"Our study is the first example of how synthetic biology will be useful for fighting bacterial infections," says biochemical engineer Matthew Chang, an author on the paper, which is published today in Molecular Systems Biology.1
Chang and his team at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have engineered a strain of Escherichia coli bacteria that attacks Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium that can cause lethal infections.
Pseudomonas aeruginosa competes with its own species by producing toxic proteins called pyocins. Chang's team exploited this molecular system by giving E. coli the genes for pyocin S5, which kills strains of P. aeruginosa that infect people. Because each pyocin targets only certain bacterial strains, the toxin will not kill other bacteria living in the body.
"Pyocins are the Pseudomonas bacterium's own species-specific antibiotics, so using pyocins...
Related Articles
By Megan Molteni and Anil Oza, STAT | 10.07.2025
For two years, a panel of scientific experts, clinicians, and patient advocates had been hammering out ways to increase community engagement in National Institutes of Health-funded science. When they presented their road map to the NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya last...
By Abby McCloskey, The Dallas Morning News | 10.10.2025
We Texans like to do things our way — leave some hide on the fence rather than stay corralled, as goes a line in Wallace O. Chariton’s Texas dictionary This Dog’ll Hunt. Lately, I’ve been wondering what this ethos...
By Émile P. Torres, Truthdig | 10.17.2025
The Internet philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky has been predicting the end of the world for decades. In 1996, he confidently declared that the singularity — the moment at which computers become more “intelligent” than humanity — would happen in 2021, though...
By Pam Belluck, The New York Times | 10.17.2025
Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.
First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to...