P1 Bacteriophage-Enabled Delivery of CRISPR-Cas9 Antimicrobial Activity Against .

The discovery of clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) and the Cas9 RNA-guided nuclease provides unprecedented opportunities to selectively kill specific populations or species of bacteria. However, the use of CRISPR-Cas9 to clear bacterial infections is hampered by the inefficient delivery of 9 genetic constructs into bacterial cells. Here, we use a broad-host-range P1-derived phagemid to deliver the CRISPR-Cas9 chromosomal-targeting system into and the dysentery-causing to achieve DNA sequence-specific killing of targeted bacterial cells.

Tail-Engineered Phage P2 Enables Delivery of Antimicrobials into Multiple Gut Pathogens.

Bacteriophages can be reprogrammed to deliver antimicrobials for therapeutic and biocontrol purposes and are a promising alternative treatment to antimicrobial-resistant bacteria. Here, we developed a bacteriophage P4 cosmid system for the delivery of a Cas9 antimicrobial into clinically relevant human gut pathogens and O157:H7. Our P4 cosmid design produces a high titer of cosmid-transducing units without contamination by a helper phage.

The Role of O-antigen in P1 Transduction of Shigella flexneri and Escherichia coli with its Alternative S' Tail Fibre.

Enterobacteria phage P1 expresses two types of tail fibre, S and S'. Despite the wide usage of phage P1 for transduction, the host range and the receptor for its alternative S' tail fibre was never determined. Here, a ΔS-cin Δpac E.