The Phage Foundry team is excited to share a new preprint led by Phage Foundry postdoctoral researcher Jessica Trinh (Sandia National Laboratories, Mageeney Lab) and co-investigator Catherine Mageeney (Sandia National Laboratories).
The preprint abstract is below.
Background: Acinetobacter baumannii is a common bacterial pathogen in nosocomial infections. It has become one of the greatest threats to human health for its growing resistance to last resort antibiotics, which has led to a revival of phage therapy as a potential treatment. However, conventional methods for isolating A. baumannii-infecting phages are labor-intensive and often unsuccessful.
Methods: Our approach involves a computational pipeline to identify temperate phages (prophages) integrated into A. baumannii genomes, followed by mitomycin C (MMC) induction of those strains to screen for active prophages.
Results: Here we show a prophage analysis for nearly 900 A. baumannii genomes. We observed MMC-triggered excision of nine prophages from eight A. baumannii strains by PCR and sequencing. Further we show four prophage form virions detectable by transmission electron microscopy, and two which can plaque on other A. baumannii isolates.
Conclusion: This work demonstrates the utility and diversity of prophages for further development as therapeutics for antibiotic resistant A. baumannii.