Missiled Bacteriophage Enabling Controlled Infant Gut Health

Baojun Wang of the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom will engineer bacteriophages to selectively target gut pathogens such as Shigella and Salmonella that cause widespread environmental enteropathy in infants in developing countries. They will program the CRISPR-Cas9 (clustered, regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats-CRISPR-associated proteins) nucleases to cut the chromosomes of the target pathogens, and test their ability to block infection in a mouse gut colonization model while leaving the non-pathogenic and often beneficial bacteria largely intact.