Understanding the mechanism and cost of phage resitance in the Enterobacteriaceae

With the ever-growing threat of antibiotic resistant infections, there is a critical need for alternatives to antibiotics. Bacteriophage are a group of viruses that specifically infect bacteria and can be used as antimicrobial agents against bacterial infections. Phages and bacteria are locked in a never-ending evolutionary arms race, whereby bacteria develop resistance to phages and then phages overcome this resistance. For phages to be used as therapeutic agents it is critical to understand the mechanism of phage resistance and if different resistance mechanisms occur with different phages. Furthermore, for phages that are capable of infecting bacteria of different bacterial hosts, it is not known if the same mechanism of resistance evolves in different hosts.