Researchers find a way to stop bacterial infections without antibiotics
Bacterial infections could be prevented using tiny biochemical machines - nanofactories - that can confuse bacteria and stop them from spreading, without the use of antibiotics, according to research by a team at the A James Clark School of Engineering, at the University of Maryland in the US.
Bacterial infections could be prevented using tiny biochemical machines - nanofactories - that can confuse bacteria and stop them from spreading, without the use of antibiotics, according to research by a team at the A James Clark School of Engineering, at the University of Maryland in the US.
A paper about the research, Engineered biological nanofactories trigger quorum sensing response in targeted bacteria, by Rohan Fernandes, Varnika Roy, Hsuan-Chen Wu and their adviser William Bentley, is published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
The team has updated its original nanofactories, developed in 2007, which made use of tiny magnetic bits to guide them to the infection site.
"This is a completely new, all-biological version," says Bentley. "The new nanofactories are self-guided and targeted. We've demonstrated for the first time that they're capable of finding a specific kind of bacterium and inducing it to communicate a much finer level of automation and control."
Bacterial cells use quorum sensing to communicate and when they sense that they have reached a certain quantity an infection could be triggered. The biological nanofactories developed at the Clark School can interrupt this communication, disrupting the actions of the cells and shutting down an infection.
They could also be used to "trick" the bacteria into sensing a quorum too early. Doing so would trigger the bacteria to try to form an infection before there are enough bacterial cells to do harm. This would prompt a natural immune system response capable of stopping them without the use of drugs.
Because nanofactories are designed to affect communication instead of trying to kill the bacteria, they could help treat illness in cases where a strain of bacteria has become resistant to antibiotics.
"Quorum sensing and signalling molecules are actually used to accomplish a lot of things," Bentley says. "Sometimes disease develops because communication is not taking place - a good example is digestive disorders that involve an imbalance of bacteria in the digestive tract. In that case, nanofactories could be used to start or increase communication instead of disrupting it."