Team:WLC-Milwaukee
Project Description
For this year's project the WLC-Milwaukee team is looking into phage therapy. Specifically we are looking for phages specific to the outer-membrane efflux pore protein TolC. TolC analogs are found in most gram-negative bacteria, and they have been implicated as an essential protein in an efflux-based resistance mechanism to certain types of antibiotics. Our project involves expressing TolC homologs from infectious strains of bacteria in a tolC knockout strain of E. coli. We are using these transgenic E. coli to search for bacteriophages specific to our selected gastrointestinal tract pathogen's versions of TolC. Our hope is that the phages specific for a pathogen's TolC can be used in combination with an antibiotic generally resisted via an efflux mechanism to put the pathogenic bacteria in a lose-lose dilemma: bacteria which try to efflux the antibiotics will expose themselves to the pathogen-specific phage, while those which do not express TolC will be weakened to the antibiotic therapy.