First, Jacobs and colleagues used Mycobacterium smegmatis as a surrogate host, because of its much faster growth rate (~3 hour doubling time), coupled with mycobacteriophages which had been shown to infect both M. The approach illustrated three additional aspects of working with the mycobacteria and their phages. An important breakthrough in the late 1980’s occurred when it was demonstrated that phage DNA could be taken up by mycobacterial spheroplasts, followed by conversion into infectious units and plaque formation ( 12). tuberculosis in human health was known from the early studies by Koch, our knowledge of the organism was limited for many years because of the inability to genetically transform it with the uptake of DNA ( 11). This general concept of exploiting the relative rapid propagation of mycobacteriophages has been a common theme in their subsequent development ( 8– 10).Īlthough the important role of M. Mycobacterium tuberculosis – the causative agent of human TB – has a remarkably slow growth rate (24-hour doubling time), so phage typing can speed up diagnosis by several weeks. typing) clinical isolates by scoring for phage sensitivity profiles, with the prospects of obtaining data considerably faster than standard protocols that required extensive growth of the host. Mycobacteriophages thus presented a plausible means of identifying (i.e. At that time it was recognized that bacteriophages display particular profiles of specificity for their bacterial hosts, nearly always distinguishing between bacteria in different genera, and sometimes distinguishing between strains of the same bacterial species ( 4– 7). Because of the importance of mycobacterial diseases such as tuberculosis (TB) and leprosy, mycobacteriophages have been long-studied, with the first ones being isolated in the 1940’s ( 1– 3).
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