ABOVE: © SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, KEITH CHAMBERS
When microbiologist Breck Duerkop started his postdoc in 2009, he figured he’d be focusing on bacteria. After all, he’d joined the lab of microbiome researcher Lora Hooper at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas to study host-pathogen interactions in the mammalian gut and was particularly interested in what causes some strains of normally harmless commensal bacteria, such as Enterococcus faecalis, to become dangerous, gut-dominating pathogens. He’d decided to explore the issue by giving germ-free mice a multidrug-resistant strain of E. faecalis that sometimes causes life-threatening infections in hospital patients, and analyzing how these bacteria express their genes in the mouse intestine.
Not long into the project, Duerkop noticed something else going on: some of the genes being expressed in E. faecalis weren’t from the regular bacterial genome. Rather, they were from bacteriophages, bacteria-infecting viruses that, if they don’t immediately hijack ...
