Current Pharmaceutical Biotechnology - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2010

Bacteriophages (phages) are the viruses of bacteria and phage therapy is the application of phages to control or eliminate bacteria and their infections. Phage therapy holds great promise as a means of augmenting the use of chemical antibiotics to control bacteria, including antibiotic-resistant bacteria or under circumstances where antibiotic treatment is less safe or otherwise undesirable. Applications include treatme Read More

Phage therapy is the use of bacteriophages—viruses that use bacteria as their host cells—as biocontrol agents of bacteria. Currently, phage therapy is garnering renewed interest as bacterial resistance to antibiotics becomes widespread. Historically, phage therapy was largely abandoned in the West in the 1940s due to the advent of chemical antibiotics, and the unreliability of phage-based treatments when compared to a Read More

Phage therapy is the application of phages to bodies, substances, or environments to effect the biocontrol of pathogenic or nuisance bacteria. To be effective, phages, minimally, must be capable of attaching to bacteria (adsorption), killing those bacteria (usually associated with phage infection), and otherwise surviving (resisting decay) until they achieve attachment and subsequent killing. While a strength of phage therapy is that Read More

Phage therapy—application of bacteria-specific viruses to reduce densities of pathogenic or nuisance bacteria— is a two-step process involving phage penetration to target bacteria followed by bacteria killing. Any analysis of these steps is inherently ecological as they represent phage-environment interactions, i.e., between phages and bacteria as well as between phages and body tissues. In considering phages more g Read More

Bacteria cause a number of economically important plant diseases. Bacterial outbreaks are generally problematic to control due to lack of effective bactericides and to resistance development. Bacteriophages have recently been evaluated for controlling a number of phytobacteria and are now commercially available for some diseases. Major challenges of agricultural use of phages arise from the inherent diversity of target bact Read More

The use of phage or phage products in food production has recently become an option for the food industry as a novel method for biocontrol of unwanted pathogens, enhancing the safety of especially fresh and ready-to-eat food products. While it can be expected that many more phage products currently under development might become available in the future, several questions may be raised concerning the use of suc Read More

Phage therapy is the application of bacteria-specific viruses with the goal of reducing or eliminating pathogenic or nuisance bacteria. While phage therapy has become a broadly relevant technology, including veterinary, agricultural, and food microbiology applications, it is for the treatment or prevention of human infections that phage therapy first caught the world's imagination - see, especially, Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (1 Read More

The conversion of prion protein (PrP) from the monomeric cellular isoform to the oligomeric pathological isoform is a crucial event in the pathogenesis of prion diseases. To investigate oligomer formation of PrP, enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP)-tagged PrP (EGFP-PrP) without the glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI) anchor was prepared and the oligomerization of EGFP-PrP induced by sodium dodecyl sulphate (SD Read More

We examined the photophysical properties of the new near infrared (NIR) fluorescent label SeTau-665 on a plasmonic platform of self- assembled colloidal structures (SACS) of silver prepared on a semitransparent silver film. A SeTau-665 immunoassay was performed on this platform and a control glass slide. The fluorescence properties of this label substantially change due to plasmonic interactions. While the average bright Read More

Mammalian cell cultivation plays a great role in producing protein therapeutics in the last decades. Many engineering parameters are considered for optimization during process development in mammalian cell cultivation, only shear and mixing are especially highlighted in this paper. It is believed that shear stress due to agitation has been over-estimated to damage cells, but shear may result in nonlethal physiological res Read More

A variety of technologies can be used in the detection of contagious pathogens. In the early stage of an outbreak of a new infectious disease, rtPCR is advantageous over many other assays. The rtPCR can be developed either using low fidelity DNA polymerase or high fidelity DNA polymerase. The application of high fidelity DNA polymerase allows the shortening of assay development. In addition, the synthesized DNA template Read More

Conventional biochemical assays are performed via an averaging procedure with the lysate of a large number of target cells; however, the averaged data lose information regarding the heterogeneity of individual cells. For quantitative assay of single cells, it is necessary to isolate single cells, extract cellular components and detect extremely small amounts of molecules from the individual cells. We developed new system Read More

p53, a tumor suppressor and a transcription factor, binds DNA in a sequence-specific manner. In more than half of human cancers, p53 has been found to be mutated with the loss of DNA-binding ability. In this review, we focus on the sensitive detection of interaction of tumor suppressor p53 with double-stranded DNA bearing the consensus sequence and proteins, such as monoclonal antibodies recognizing the p53 protein an Read More

This paper reviews the development of a magnetic modulation biosensing (MMB) system for rapid, simple and sensitive detection of biological targets in homogeneous solution at low concentrations. It relies on condensation and modulation of the fluorescent-labeled probes attached to magnetic beads using an alternating magnetic field gradient. Condensation of the beads from the entire volume increases the signal whi Read More