Guest guest Posted August 20, 2006 Report Share Posted August 20, 2006 Gee, wouldn't it be something if Meyer ends up curing us all? lol! pennymickiedarnell <mickiedarnell@...> wrote: http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/08/18/edible.virus.ap/index.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted August 20, 2006 Report Share Posted August 20, 2006 Heres a pessimistic view on phages, which I dont necessarily agree with really, in Nature: http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v22/n2/full/nbt0204-167.html It points out 2 things that are important. One is that some phages encode nasty toxins... indeed some toxin-producing bacteria such as diptheriae only produce the toxin because they are lysogenized with a virus that encodes it. As I recall he claims this is relatively common. If so, it might be perilous to use phage that havent been carefully charecterized as to whether they encode any toxins. Since, I guess, not every unknown toxin (if any exist) is necessarily sequence-homologous to any known toxin, this charecterization would seem to require functional toxin assays such as testing on mammals. Second, he explains that most strains of most species of bacteria are insensitive to most phage strains which that species can host. Apparantly thats why broad phage cocktails and/or careful strain typing of the bacteria and/or empiricial in vitro sensitivity testing are needed. > > http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/08/18/edible.virus.ap/index.html > Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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