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Viruses use bacteria’s chemical language to time their destruction; this might lead to new ways to fight infections In the early experiments it looked like the virus called VP882 was doing something that should be impossible for a thing that is not a bacterium, and not technically even alive: intercepting molecular messages exchanged by its host bacteria, and reading them to determine the best time to annihilate the whole bacterial colony. “As scientists, this is just unimaginable to us,” says Bonnie Bassler, a molecular biologist at Princeton University. “We were delighted and skeptical at the same time. It was almost...

Washington University School of Medicine researchers have found that those patients who suffer from inflammatory bowel diseases also had a greater variety of viruses contained within their digestive systems than they found in the bowels of health volunteers. This, they believe, suggests that viruses somehow play a role in the development of this condition. ... “This is the tip of the iceberg. A significant portion of the viral DNA we identified in these patients is unfamiliar to us—it comes from newly identified viruses we don’t know much about,” explains senior study author Herbert W. Virgin. “We have a great deal...

Enlarge Image Viral attack. A handful of P1 phages pierce the membrane of an E. coli bacterium, as seen under electron microscopy (left panels) and a 3D reconstruction (right). Credit: Adapted from J. Liu et al., Virology, 417 (1 September 2011) Forget needles in haystacks. Try finding the tip of a needle in a virus. Scientists have long known that a group of viruses called bacteriophages have a knack for infiltrating bacteria and that some begin their attack with a protein spike. But the tip of this spike is so small that no one knew what it was made...

Viruses that target bacteria could help give antibiotics a boost. An engineered phage renders E. coli more susceptible to DNA-damaging drugs.MedicalRF.com / Science Photo Library Biologists have engineered viruses to weaken the bacteria they infect, leaving the bugs more vulnerable to antibiotics. With more bacteria becoming resistant to the most commonly used antibiotics, the viral approach could extend the useful lifetime of these drugs.The notion of fighting infection by harnessing the viruses that infect and kill bacteria dates back nearly a century. Doctors in the former Soviet Union routinely prescribed a cocktail of such viruses — called 'bacteriophages' or just...