A Tail Fiber Engineering Platform for Improved Bacterial Transduction-Based Diagnostic Reagents.

Bacterial transduction particles were critical to early advances in molecular biology and are currently experiencing a resurgence in interest within the diagnostic and therapeutic fields. The difficulty of developing a robust and specific transduction reagent capable of delivering a genetic payload to the diversity of strains constituting a given bacterial species or genus is a major impediment to their expanded utility as commercial products. While recent advances in engineering the reactivity of these reagents have made them more attractive for product development, considerable improvements are still needed.