Team:Carnegie Mellon/Project/Abstract

Abstract

Due to the widespread misuse and overuse of antibiotics, drug resistant bacteria now pose significant risks to health, agriculture and the environment. An alternative to conventional antibiotics is phage therapy. However, many temperate phage also form prophage. Our approach to antibiotic resistance is to engineer a temperate phage, Lambda, with light-activated production of superoxide. The fluorescent protein KillerRed was cloned into a plasmid vector and lambda gt11 with the IPTG inducible lac promoter. Lysogens were isolated and these strains were characterized and compared to E. coli with KillerRed from high-copy plasmids. Light activation of KillerRed resulted in decreased cell numbers. In addition, we modeled our system at multiple scales, including populations of phage and bacteria, KillerRed gene expression, ROS production, and effects of light. Having two methods of killing, lysis and superoxide, decreases the probability of developing resistance and our system overcomes the prior limitations of using wild-type temperate phages.

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) released a threat report on September 16th, 2013 on the subject of antibiotic resistant bacteria.