Viruses Decision-Making Process Could Lead To New Antibiotic Treatments, Study Finds

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Humans are bound to encounter hundreds of decision-making process every day, but it seem they are not alone as even the tiniest viruses also make decisions. However, researchers believe that the understanding of how they do so could lead to better treatments for some diseases.

The study conducted by researchers at Texas A&M AgriLife Research found how the lambda phage decides what actions to take in its host, the E. coli bacterium. A phage is a virus is characterized by infecting and replicating within a bacterium and was first discovered about 100 years ago. But researchers have only recently begun to study how they can be used as an instrument to combat disease-causing bacteria, especially strains that have become more resistant to antibiotics.

They are said to be numerous and diverse and number into the billions, according to reports in the United States National Library of Medicine. The researchers are now focusing on the viruses that have the potential for curing specific bacterial infections.

The lambda phage prefers to inhibit the E. coli bacteria, thus making it a target for researchers. While tracking the target, a graduate student of the lead author, Jimmy Trinh developed a four-color fluorescence reporter system that can track it at the single-virus level, according to Science Daily.

This was combined with computational models developed by Dr. Gábor Balázsi, a biomedical engineer and collaborator at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York, to unravel both the interactions between phages and how individual phages determine the fate of a cell. The researchers found that their decision-making process is similar to that of humans as the lambda phage sometimes cooperates with others and competes other times.

The researchers were able to note that timing played a key role in decision-making via the process they developed. The researchers state that some phages can have two cycles of reproduction - lytic and lysogenic. While full copies of the virus are made inside of a cell in the lytic cycle, and then bursts open and dies when the phage-infected cell becomes full of the replicating viruses.

In lysogenic cycle, the DNA of the viruses lives as part of the bacterium and the both of them continue to co-exist and reproduce as one. Better put, while lysogeny involves cooperation, lysis involves competition, lead author of the study Dr. Lanying Zeng.

The researchers believe that the key to using phages to destroy bacteria is to understand how and when a phage decides to go lytic on the pathogen. The four-color fluorescence reporter system also assisted the study authors to understand that so many factors contribute to the decision making process and that from the evolutionary point of view, the phages want to optimize their own fitness or survival.

This is the reason why they choose either lytic or lysogenic to maximize or optimize their survival. The researchers also identified some of the factors that led to competition and others that led to cooperation, according to Eurekalet.

They noted that since the phage therapy is a growing field used in seeking ways to treat bacteria, the findings of the study could be of immense benefit to scientists in order to advance their research. AThe findings of the study was published in the journal Nature Communications.