David Low, a top professor in UCSB’s Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, will kick off an innovative global health and development research project known as “Strategy for development of enteric pathogen-specific phage”. Kenny Slaught explained that Low’s research focuses on a new way to deal with infectious bacterial pathogens that are becoming resistant to many once-powerful antibiotics. He will be engineering phage to specifically target and destroy several pathogenic bacteria to sway enteric diseases in infants. The study will develop different evolutions of the T2 lytic bacteriophage that bind multiple different regions of the BamA protein unearthed on the surface of many pathogenic bacteria, which will ensure they only affect these target bacteria. They will test the different phage for capacity to knock out pathogenic E. coli and Shigella, and whether they form resistance to the drugs.
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