The effects of distributed life cycles on the dynamics of viral infections

Genomic analyses of two novel biofilm-degrading methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus phages

Background

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) biofilm producers represent an important etiological agent of many chronic human infections. Antibiotics and host immune responses are largely ineffective against bacteria within biofilms. Alternative actions and novel antimicrobials should be considered. In this context, the use of phages to destroy MRSA biofilms presents an innovative alternative mechanism.

Results

Twenty-five MRSA biofilm producers were used as substrates to isolate MRSA-specific phages. Despite the difficulties in obtaining an isolate of this phage, two phages (UPMK_1 and UPMK_2) were isolated. Both phages varied in their ability to produce halos around their plaques, host infectivity, one-step growth curves, and electron microscopy features. Furthermore, both phages demonstrated antagonistic infectivity on planktonic cultures. This was validated in an in vitro static biofilm assay (in microtiter-plates), followed by the visualization of the biofilm architecture in situ via confocal laser scanning microscopy before and after phage infection, and further supported by phages genome analysis. The UPMK_1 genome comprised 152,788 bp coding for 155 putative open reading frames (ORFs), and its genome characteristics were between the Myoviridae and Siphoviridae family, though the morphological features confined it more to the Siphoviridae family. The UPMK_2 has 40,955 bp with 62 putative ORFs; morphologically, it presented the features of the Podoviridae though its genome did not show similarity with any of the S. aureus in the Podoviridae family. Both phages possess lytic enzymes that were associated with a high ability to degrade biofilms as shown in the microtiter plate and CLSM analyses.

Conclusions

The present work addressed the possibility of using phages as potential biocontrol agents for biofilm-producing MRSA.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (10.1186/s12866-019-1484-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Non-Markovian random walks and nonlinear reactions: subdiffusion and propagating fronts

The main aim of the paper is to incorporate the nonlinear kinetic term into non-Markovian transport equations described by a continuous time random walk (CTRW) with nonexponential waiting time distributions. We consider three different CTRW models with reactions. We derive nonlinear Master equations for the mesoscopic density of reacting particles corresponding to CTRW with arbitrary jump and waiting time distributions. We apply these equations to the problem of front propagation in the reaction-transport systems with Kolmogorov-Petrovskii-Piskunov kinetics and anomalous diffusion. We have found an explicit expression for the speed of a propagating front in the case of subdiffusive transport.