Hi everyone ! Since already a month, I began my internship one of the biology laboratory of the University of Aveiro in Portugal, where I joined the ENVIPHAGE project [1]. The ENVIPHAGE project involves Spanish research and development bodies (Fundación AZTI and Biopolis SL), a research group from the University of Aveiro (Portugal) and Aguacircia fish farm (Portugal). The main purpose of this project is to evaluate the impact of bacteriophages use in environmental bacterial ecology. Picture from GoogleMaps Why this project ? Over the years, we noticed an increase in the world total aquaculture production. In fact, this production has increased from 8.7 million tons of fish in 1990 to 31.6 million tons in 2006 [2]. But that increase wasn’t without any consequences ! The number of pathogenic infection in the fish farming increased too. To face the problem, scientists and companies tried to take preventive measures to limit the problem, for example, the use of antibiotics. But there are several factors that accentuated this serious problem, such as the very variable environmental conditions [2] ; the resistance against antibiotics in common pathogenic bacteria [2] ; the destruction of the bacterial population the the environment [2] ; and the few licensed antibiotic for fisheries uses [2]. But since a few years, an alternative to antibiotics have been tested : the bacteriophages, also called phages. What is a bacteriophage ? Phages are viruses which infect targeted species or strains of bacteria. It exists 2 types of phages, lytic and lysogenic [3]. (See the picture bellow to understand the two different types of phages) Picture from http://cnx.org/resources/a0861053f05c94a3b8275aef46686538e3e073d2/Figure_21_02_03.png Since phages are supposed to inactivate only targeted bacteria, this alternative could avoid problem such as the destruction of the bacterial environment. Besides phages are viruses, so they have a higher rate of mutation than the bigger part of the bacteria and that make them more efficient to face some bacterial mutation and avoid resistant bacteria. But concretely, what is the goal of the project ? The first objective of this project was to test if phages could be use in real condition to fight against pathogenic bacteria. The team finished that part before my arrival. I will talk more about that part in an other post. The second objective is to see if the pages that we could possibly use in fish farming would make any environmental damage or not. See you soon for a next post, where I will explain what I am doing there. References :
[1] http://www.enviphage.eu/en/ [2] Phage Therapy and Photodynamic Therapy: Low Environmental Impact Approaches to Inactivate Microorganisms in Fish Farming Plants, Adelaide Almeida, Ângela Cunha, Newton C.M. Gomes, Eliana Alves, Liliana Costa and Maria A.F. Faustino [3] Bacteriophage remediation of bacterial pathogens in aquaculture: a review of the technology, Gary P Richards
4 Comments
Cécile
17/10/2016 03:51:03 pm
Hey! It sounds very interesting!
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Nicolas
20/10/2016 05:35:18 am
Hi Cécile !
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Adèle
30/10/2016 02:44:58 am
Hi Nicolas !
Nicolas
10/11/2016 06:36:41 am
Hi Adèle ! Leave a Reply. |