My initial thoughts lead me to search on Scopus if there was any up and coming research on the use of bacteriophages in the “omics” fields; however, when I searched up “Bacteriophage” and “Omics” only 8 results appeared and only two seemed to focus on bacteriophage use. Therefore, I decided to take a different approach and see if any new treatments or discoveries using bacteriophages have been made, so I restarted my search on scopus using the keywords: Bacteriophage AND medicine. With this search, I resulted in 601 different articles, which gave me much more variety. I chose the article,  “What Can We Learn from a Metagenomic Analysis of a Georgian Bacteriophage Cocktail?” by Zschach. H and Joensen. KG Viruses 2015,7(12), mainly because the title had intrigued me due to the involvement of the genome which was involved in my initial search and also because I wanted to learn the significance of the Georgian Bacteriophage Cocktail.

Phage therapy has become widespread in Eastern Europe; however its potential to combat antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections in Western medicine has not been unlocked. In order to help facilitate this process, the Eliava Institute in Georgia has chosen to use this specific study to identify and analyze the major components of the Intesti phage cocktail, which was developed in Paris at the Pasteur Institute and is a combination of sterile phage lysates active against Shigella, E. coli, Proteus vulgaris and mirabilis, Enterococcus, Staphylococcus aureus, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

To execute the research, scientists sequenced the complete cocktail as a metagenome, amplified the component phages on eight different hosts and isolated DNA from the resulting lysates. However, before scientists were able to sequence the samples, they had to prepare the samples with solutions in order to remove possible bacterial DNA leftovers. Phage clusters were then constructed using grouping contigs sorted by size and depth of coverage. Lastly, in order to verify the cocktail’s capability to cause lysis of the specified pathogens, five to ten strains were selected for each pathogen and tested for susceptibility towards the phage cocktail by streaking the bacteria onto an agar plate perpendicular to a streak of phage solution.

The table represents the exact number of strains tested and the fraction of strains found susceptible. The streaking tests confirmed that the cocktail was in principle able to cause lysis of strains of all seven pathogens specified by the producer, albeit with differing specificity for the different pathogens. The apparent low efficiency in lysis of Staphylococcus is due to the fact that only five of the ten tested isolates were S. aureus, of which all but one were susceptible.

The article allowed scientists to explore which types of sequence-based analysis are able to result in useful conclusions using phage cocktails.

Keywords: Bacteriophage, medicine, metagenomic

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