Temperate phage-antibiotic synergy is widespread, but varies by phage, host, and antibiotic pairing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract With a decline in antibiotic effectiveness, there is a renewed interest in bacteriophage (phage) therapy. Phages are bacterial-specific viruses that can be used alone or with antibiotics to reduce bacterial load. Most phages are unsuitable for therapy because they are ‘temperate’ and can integrate into the host genome, forming a lysogen which is protected from subsequent phage infections. However, integrated phages can be awakened by stressors such as antibiotics. This interaction was previously reported to result in a potent synergy between antibiotic classes and a model E. coli temperate phage, which can readily eradicate the bacterium at sub-lethal concentrations of antibiotics, despite the poor effectiveness of the phage alone. Here we explore the generalizability of this synergy to a clinically relevant pathogen: Pseudomonas aeruginosa . Thirty-six temperate phages isolated from clinical strains were screened for synergy with six antibiotics (ciprofloxacin, levofloxacin, meropenem, piperacillin, tobramycin, polymyxin B), using checkerboard assays. Interestingly, our screen identified phages that can synergize with each antibiotic, despite their widely differing targets - however, these are highly phage-antibiotic and phage-host pairing specific. Screening the strongest pairings across multiple clinical strains reveal that these phages can reduce the antibiotic minimum inhibitory concentration up to 32-fold, even in a resistant isolate, functionally re-sensitizing the bacterium to the antibiotic. When meropenem and tobramycin were effective synergistic agents, they did not reduce the frequency of lysogens, suggesting a mechanism of action independent of the temperate nature of the phages. In contrast, ciprofloxacin and piperacillin were able to reduce the frequency of lysogeny, the former by inducing phages – as previously reported in E. coli . Curiously, synergy with piperacillin reduced the frequency of lysogeny, but not by inducing the phages, and therefore likely acts by biasing the phage away from lysogeny in the initial infection. Overall, our findings indicate that temperate phages can act as adjuvants to antibiotics in clinically relevant pathogens, even in the presence of antibiotic resistance, thereby drastically expanding their therapeutic potential.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".