A professor in UCSB’s Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, David Low, will pursue a progressive global health and development research project called “Strategy for development of enteric pathogen-specific phage”. Low’s research, notes Kenny Slaught, focuses on a new way to deal with major bacterial pathogens that are becoming resistant to many powerful antibiotics. Low will engineer phage to selectively target and kill several pathogenic bacteria to jettison any possibilities of enteric diseases in babies. They will engineer a series of different T2 lytic bacteriophage that connect multiple different regions of the BamA protein located on the surface of several pathogenic bacteria, which will ensure they only infect these specified bacteria. Furthermore, they will test the different phage for capacity to eliminate pathogenic E. coli and Shigella, and determine whether or not they have the ability to develop resistance.
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