« ASM 2008: Microbes do the darndest things | Main | ASM 2008: Yum... mercury »

ASM 2008: Zit-zapping viruses

Here’s one of the more creative uses of viruses that I’ve come across: harnessing viruses that attack bacteria to kill off a bug commonly associated with particularly nasty pimples.

The bacterium in the crosshairs is Propionibacterium acnes, and has been linked to the more serious pimples of the most common form of acne: “acne vulgaris”. Michael Davis of Central Connecticut State University has been swabbing the foreheads, noses, and backs of students to build a collection nearly 400 P. acnes isolates. He and his team of graduate and undergraduate students then tested several dozen viruses against the P. acnes cultures. They’ve found a few that can kill specific strains of P. acnes, and now they’re exposing their viruses to UV light to create viral mutants that, they hope, will be active against a wide variety of P. acnes strains. Davis along with his team (undergrads Margaret Zurowski and Brandon Albright, and grad student Kathryn Neely) presented their work as a poster this morning.

Posted by Heidi Ledford on June 02, 2008
Categories: | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://blogs.nature.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/5298

Comments

wooo hooo CCSU what what! Congratulations guys, very cool stuff. sounds kind of familiar though....

Posted by: Dave Slomski | June 11, 2008 04:21 PM

wooo hooo CCSU what what! Congratulations guys, very cool stuff. sounds kind of familiar though.!!

Posted by: Oyun | August 5, 2008 04:13 PM

wooo hooo CCSU what what! Congratulations guys, very cool stuff. sounds kind of familiar though....

Posted by: Oyun | September 14, 2008 02:30 AM

Post a comment

Comments will be reviewed by staff before being published. You can be as critical or controversial as you like, but please don't get personal or offensive, and do keep it brief. Excessively long entries may be cropped. Remember this is for feedback and discussion - not for publishing papers or press releases.

We strongly encourage you to use your real, full name. Email addresses are required: this is just in case we need to discuss your comment with you privately. They won’t be published.


Please enter the numbers you see below - this helps us to cut down on spam. Note that attempting to post within 30 seconds of hitting ‘preview’ or ‘post’ can cause the system to think you are spamming the site. If you are having trouble with this system, you can instead e-mail a comment to 'inthefield at nature.com'.

Search