By Phage Consultants
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Anaerobic bacteriophage
Phage Consultants (PC) provides one of the world’s most expert bacteriophage testing services to detect phage and prophage presence across a wide spectrum of bacterial hosts, including tests for strictly anaerobic bacterial species.
Bacteriophages (phages), a group of viruses that infect bacteria, are major troublemakers for bioprocesses that are based on bacterial activities. Phages can have devastating effects on both ongoing process and also, as chronic facility contamination on subsequent batches. In some scenarios, phage contamination can paralyze facility productivity for months and sabotage re-start efforts.
In such cases, it is essential to be able to recognise what type of phage is causing the problem.
Aerobic and anaerobic bacteria
However, bacteriophages can also be used positively to combat bacterial and microbial infections as an effective strategy for both oxygen-rich (aerobic) and oxygen-limited (anaerobic) environments. The latter includes culturing of anaerobic bacteria, vacuum-packed (VP) food products and food stored in modified atmosphere packaging (MAP).
Most of the bacteria listed by the WHO World Health Organization as priorities for multidrug resistant pathogens and foodborne bacterial pathogens are facultative anaerobes that can grow with or without oxygen because they can metabolise energy aerobically or anaerobically. Knowledge of differential aerobic and anaerobic bacteria infection patterns determined by oxygen availability is a key issue with facultative anaerobic bacteria that are efficiently adapted to thrive in a range of environments. Currently increasing number of life bacterial therapeutics which aim to replace or prevent pathogenic aerobic bacterial strains infections are being developed. It is crucial to ensure no bacteriophages or prophages will interfere in the development and production process of these therapeutics.
PC provides professional phage and prophage testing across a wide spectrum of bacterial hosts, including E. coli and other production bacterial species. PC is also able to perform tests on strict anaerobes bacteria.
PC obtains superior results in devising the most efficient phage-based anaerobic bacterial contamination strategies by taking an individual approach to customer samples for more effective detection and better performance. This is leverages from the consultancy’s ability to work on virtually any culturable bacterial species and its unrivalled panel of phage types.
Understanding prophages
This specialized knowledge is particularly valuable when it comes to detecting prophage infections. Prophages are the ‘stealth weapons’ of bacteriophage infection, inserting themselves as virtual presence genomes inside host DNA where they are very difficult to detect before breaking out as virulent infections.
The presence of prophages increases the risk of false negative bacteriophage test results that can have disastrous consequences for biological production facilities, resulting in destruction of the bacterial culture and prolonged contamination of the facility.
Undetected prophages may cause occasional lysis of cultures, preventing formation of the product in given processes, as well as endangering other production processes conducted in the facility.
PC provides one of the world’s most expert testing services to detect phage and prophage presence across a wide spectrum of aerobic bacteria and anaerobic bacterial hosts and species (See Resources). Its world-leading skills and abilities to detect virulent phages and prophages derive from the specialist knowledge of its founder, CEO of Phage Consultants Marcin Los, who has been involved in study of many aspects of virulent phage development as well as prophage induction in various bacterial strains.
When combined with follow-up information on possible solutions, the result is a one-stop shop for prophage testing, detection, removal and inactivation as part of a wider portfolio of phage contamination prevention and eradication services that are highly useful for fermentation managers, fermentation operators, medium-level production and high-level facility management
Resources
Click on Phage Contamination as a Major Cause of Process Failures for webinar information.
Aerobic and anaerobic bacterial examples: Obligate aerobes [1] gather at the surface of the medium where oxygen concentrations are high. Obligate anaerobes [2] are poisoned by oxygen, so gather at the bottom where oxygen concentration is lowest. Facultative anaerobes [3] that can grow with or without oxygen gather mostly at the top of the broth because aerobic respiration generates more ATP energy than fermentation, while Microaerophiles [4] that need oxygen to ferment or respire but are poisoned by high concentrations of oxygen gather in the upper part of the mix. Finally, aerotolerant anaerobes [5] that use fermentation to make ATP can be found evenly spread throughout the fermentation. (Source: Wikipedia Commons)
Prophage formation: The bacteriophage inserts only a genetic ‘marker’ into the infected bacterial cell, ready to become active at some future time. Source: Suly12 / Asiela – Own work based on: Prophage.JPG: Wikipedia.
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