Bacteriophages
Bacteriophages (or ‘phage’) are small viruses that infect bacteria. Some phages are lytic, meaning that they undergo a productive infection within a bacterial cell, leading to the lysis and death of the bacterium. As such, there is a renewed effort to utilise phage, or rather specific cocktails of phage for the treatment of antibiotic resistant infection.
A number of groups at Leicester are studying phage as potential therapeutics, as well as the fundamental biology of phage, genomics approaches to studying phage, phage resistance in bacteria, and their role in shaping bacterial population structure.