Question

What are bacteriophages? What is there significance in clinical microbiology? please 2 pages paragraph. Thank you!

Answer 1

A bacteriophage is a type of virus that infects bacteria.The word bacteriophage means bacteria eater,because bacteriophages destroy their host cells.All bacteriophages are composed of a nucleic acid molecule that is surrounded by a protein structure.They attaches itself to a susceptible bacterium and infects the host cell.After infection,they hijacks the bacteriums cellular machinery to prevent it from producing bacterial components and instead forces the cell to produce viral components.Then new bacteriophages assemble and burst out of the bacterium in a process called lysis.They occasionally remove a portion of their host cell's bacterial DNA during the infection process and then transfer thus DNA into the genome of new host cells.This process is usually referred to as transduction.They are harmless to humans.During reproduction,they get into a bacterium,where they multiply and finally they break the bacterial cell open to release the new viruses.Therefore they kill bacteria.All bacteriophages are composed of nucleic acid molecule that is surrounded by a protein structure.They cause diseases like diphtheria,botulism etc..They occur abundantly in the biosphere,with different genomes,and lifestyles.They are classified by the International committee on taxonomy of viruses according to the morphology and nucleic acid.They acn be used for phage therapy.They acts as antibacterial agents.Also they can be used in food industry,dairy industry,for diagnostics,can ne as counteracting bioweapons and toxins,for antimicrobial drug discovery etc..

Phages are clinically significant for many reasons.Many highly pathogenic bacterial toxins are encoded by bacteriophage genomes,such that the host bacterium is only pathogenic when lysogenized by the toxin encoding phage.Second thing,they are vectors for horizontal gene transfer,which may include antimicrobial resistance genes.They also have been engineered to introduce genes into specific strains for clinical effect.Third one included their detection can be used asa biomarker for the presence of their host in a complex environmental sample.This is mostly used as a surrogate for the fecal contamination of water sources.Also they are clinically relevant for their ability to distinguish strains of the same bacterial species.Finally they were the first type of viruses to be discovered and were a part of many of the fundamental discoveries of molecular biology.Examples like ,the proof that DNA was the molecule that transmitted genetic information,the basic mechanisms of gene regulation,and the genetic code to name but a few,were all discovered using bacteriophages.