Ebinesh A and Kailash TV
The human gut is blessed with a complex ecosystem of micro biota the organization and integrity of which has not been explained though huge loads of resources and energy have been invested in achieving it. But it has been well understood that this unexplainable integrity of the gut micro biota is a major factor which maintains the stability of gut health. In the recent years, many efforts have been initiated by bodies working on global health to improve the gut health by building a strong microbial immunity due to which probiotic nutrient supplementation has been widely accepted for tackling the burden of Enteric Environmental Dysfunction (EED) in infants and children. EED was recognized as a global health issue when it was known to impair the quality of life in adulthood. Bacteriophages are known to be viruses that infect bacteria. Making use of this knowledge, one can use these bacteriophages in manipulating the gut micro biota and thus the gut health. Due to their property of host-specificity, lytic phages can be used to clear a specific clone of pathogenic bacteria while lysogenic phages can be used to tune the genome of host bacteria. Though promising, major obstacles for the acceptance of this new technique are the development of resistance by the bacteria to phage infection, insufficient knowledge about Microbiome interactions and non-availability of prototypes for pharmacological testing. Moreover, no efforts have been laid in evaluating the utility of this new technique over the existing techniques which is again a major cause for the dormancy of this novel venture. In the days to come scientists can work on modalities to hamper the development of bacterial resistance to phage infection and can introduce evaluated, titrated mixture of lytic and genetically modified lysogenic phages to build a healthy gut especially in children.
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