Harmless bacteria used to fight drug-resistant microbe
Microbe is deadly to patients with weak immune systems
Singapore researchers have found a way to re-engineer harmless bacteria—a strain of the E. coli that is present in the human gut—to fight a common drug-resistant microbe that can be deadly to hospital patients with weak immune systems, Reuters reports. Scientists put foreign DNA fragments into the E. coli, which helped it sense the dangerous pathogen and release a deadly toxin. One engineered microbe inhibited the growth of the deadly pathogen, called the Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacterium, by 90 per cent. Researchers say the same formula could be used to fight other infective agents.
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