Are Phages Overlooked Mediators of Health and Disease?

Bacteria-infecting viruses affect the composition and behavior of microbes in the mammalian gut—and perhaps influence human biology.

Written byCatherine Offord

| 14 min read

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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 ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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