When high school teacher Debbie Jacobs-Sera showed up with two of her students at Graham Hatfull's door at the University of Pittsburgh, it took only minutes for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator to put them to work. Hatfull enlisted the teens in his pet project, identifying phage viruses that infect Mycobacteria, including the organism that causes tuberculosis. Hatfull's team, including Jacobs-Sera's brother, fellow HHMI investigator William Jacobs at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, hit the jackpot. These students and others more than doubled the number of genetically characterized mycobacteriophages, bringing the total to 14.1 In their morphology and genetics, the novel phages proved very different from those previously characterized, suggesting extensive diversity.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis is one tough bug. It remains dormant in its human host for years, evading immune attack, while a thick outer coat of complex lipids protects it from toxic drugs. Hatfull says he ...
