Phage–Bacteria Interactions in Potential Applications of Bacteriophage vB_EfaS-271 against <i>Enterococcus faecalis</i>

Abstract

Phage therapy is one of main alternative option for antibiotic treatment of bacterial infections, particularly in the era of appearance of pathogenic strains revealing resistance to most or even all known antibiotics. Enterococcus faecalis is one of such pathogens causing serious human infections. In the light of high level of biodiversity of bacteriophages and specificity of phages to bacterial species or even strains, development of effective phage therapy depend, between others, on identification and characterization of a large collection of these viruses, including understanding of their interactions with host bacterial cells. Recently, isolation of molecular characterization of bacteriophage vB_EfaS-271, infecting E. faecalis strains have been reported. In this report, phage–host interactions are reported, including ability of vB_EfaS-271 to infect bacteria forming biofilms, efficiency of eliminating bacterial cells from cultures depending on multiplicity of infection (m.o.i.), toxicity of purified phage particles to mammalian cells, and efficiency of appearance of phage-resistant bacteria. The presented results indicate that vB_EfaS-271 can significantly decrease number of viable E. faecalis cells in biofilms and in liquid cultures and reveals no considerable toxicity to mammalian cells. Efficiency of formation of phage-resistant bacteria was dependent on m.o.i. and was higher when the virion-cell ratio was as high as 10 than at low (between 0.01 and 0.0001) m.o.i. values. We conclude that vB_EfaS-271 may be considered as a candidate for its further use in phage therapy.

Keywords

• bacteriophage development
• phage therapy
• phage–bacteria interactions
• bacterial biofilm
• toxicity