Scientists have taken a common bacteria found in the body and engineered it to a form that will seek out and destroy a potentially harmful microbe.
The team at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore has designed harmless E. coli (Escherichia coli) bacteria that are able to detect and kill another bacteria called Pseudomonas aeruginosa which is a serious problem to some hospital patients.
The work, which is published this week in Molecular Systems Biology, is an example of the emerging field of synthetic biology - in which researchers use engineering principles to design novel living systems.
Assistant Professors Chueh Loo Poh and Matthew Wook Chang led the team that designed the new E. coli bacteria. "To our knowledge, this is the first study to use synthetic biology to tackle infectious diseases," they say.
P. aeruginosa is a bacteria which infects the digestive and respiratory tracts and is one of the leading infections acquired in hospitals. It is resistant to many antibiotics and rapidly becomes drug intolerant. For people who have compromised immune systems, such as cancer patients on chemotherapy, it has a 50 per cent mortality rate, say the researchers.