The Deadliest Being on Planet Earth – The Bacteriophage

A war has been going on for billions of years, killing billions every day, without us even realizing it. The war is turning it into the

deadliest

creature on our

planet

: the

bacteriophage

or 'phage' for short. The phage is a virus; not quite alive, but not quite dead either. Plus, they look like someone finished them. Its head is an icosahedron, something like a die with 20 sides and 30 points. It contains the genetic material of a virus and often resides in a long tail that has leg-like fibers. There are more phages on our

planet

than all other organisms combined, including bacteria.

And they probably live wherever there are living things. Billions are now in your hands, in your intestines and in your eyes. It probably makes you nervous because phages are responsible for most of the deaths in the world, but you're in luck. While they commit genocide in the morning, they only kill bacteria. Up to 40% of all bacteria in the ocean die every day. But phages also have significant drawbacks. Like any other virus, phages need a carrier to survive and reproduce. They are nothing more than genetic material in a body and they become specialized. Typically, a phage selects a specific bacteria and perhaps even some of its closest relatives are its prey.

Imagine a phage like a rocket that only investigates and drowns the members of an unfortunate family. When a phage finds its victim, it attaches the fibers of its tail to the receptors and uses a type of syringe to make a hole in a surface. In a strange move, the phage squeezes its tail and injects its own genetic information. Within minutes, the bacteria are invaded. Now it is forced to generate new facts. They only stop when the bacteria are filled with new phages. Finally, they produce 'endolysin', a powerful enzyme that punctures bacteria. The pressure is so high that the bacteria vomits out everything inside and dies.

New phages are released and then a new cycle begins. In recent years,

bacteriophage

s have attracted the attention of the

deadliest

creatures on the planet: humans. Lately, we've started injecting millions of them into our bodies because we're feeling a little desperate; We fail. In the past, a single sip of contaminated water would have drowned us. Bacteria have been our phages. The little monsters that conquered us without mercy. But about 100 years ago we found solutions in nature. By chance we found microfungi that produced poisons that suffocated the bacteria: antibiotics. Suddenly we turned it into a super powerful weapon.

Antibiotics were so effective that we no longer considered bacteria monsters. Only the old and weakest among us continued to be killed by them. We use antibiotics more and more for increasingly harmless diseases. Thus we lost respect for the monsters and for the weapon that killed them. But bacteria are living

being

s that gradually evolve and began to become immune to our weapons. This continued until we created "superbugs" - bacteria that are immune to any drugs we have made against them. This immunity of yours is spreading all over the world even now as we are watching this video.

By 2050, superbugs could kill more people a year than cancer. The days are coming back when a small cut, infection or cough could kill you or your loved ones. In the United States alone, more than 23,000 people die each year from resistant bacteria. But it seems that phages, or little killer robot-viruses, can save us. We can inject them into our body to help us recover from infections. Wait a minute, how could injecting millions of viruses be a good idea? Phages are very, very specialized killers for killing bacteria. So specialized, in fact, that humans are completely immune to them; we are so different.

We encounter billions of phages every day and we just politely ignore each other. Antibiotics are like a frequent bombardment that kills everything, including the bacteria we don't want to kill. Phages are like guided missiles that attack only the right targets. Wait a minute, if we use phages to kill bacteria, don't the bacteria develop some kind of defense? Well, it's more complex than that; Phages have also evolved. For billions of years, a real war has been waged between them and bacteria, and so far the phages have been successful. This turns phages into intelligent killers that constantly hone their killing skills.

But even if bacteria become immune to our protective phages, we can still emerge victorious. To become resistant to only a small number of phage types, bacteria must give up their resistance to antibiotics. Maybe we can catch them in a trap with no way out. This has been successfully tested on a patient who had no other hope of recovery. The bacteria 'Pseudomonas Aeruginosa', one of the most feared bacteria, infects the human chest cavity. It is resistant to almost all antibiotics. and could even survive alcohol-based hand sanitizer. After several years of suffering, several thousand phages were inserted directly into the patient's chest cavity along with antibiotics and the bacteria became immune.

After a few weeks, the infection completely disappeared. Unfortunately, this treatment is still only experimental and pharmaceutical companies are still reluctant to invest billions in a treatment that is not yet officially approved. But things are finally moving forward. In 2016, a large clinical trial of phage treatment began and this method is gaining more and more attention. It's good to get used to them because the era of antibiotics as a super weapon is coming to an end. It may seem like a strange concept, but injecting Earth's deadliest creatures directly into our bodies could save millions of lives. This video was made possible thanks to a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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