Phage Therapy Against Foulbrood Disease in Honey Bees
Additional Funding Sources
The project described was supported by NSF Award No. OIA-1757324 from the NSF Idaho EPSCoR Program and by the National Science Foundation. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF. The project received additional support from a student grant from the UI Office of Undergraduate Research.
Presentation Date
7-2022
Abstract
Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are the most important pollinator species in agriculture. The pollination performed by managed honey bees is essential to meet food production requirements. They are also emerging as a model system for studying animal microbiomes. In particular, anthropogenic changes to bee environments affect microbiome interactions in complex and poorly understood ways. Foulbrood is a disease caused by bacteria that infect honey bee larvae. These bacteria are deadly to colonies and difficult to eliminate, especially when regulations deter the use of antibiotics. With this situation threatening bees, isolating and evolving bacteriophages capable of killing foulbrood, a technique called phage therapy, may be a solution to eliminating this microbial disease. I acquired the freezer stocks from a similar honey bee-phage study at the University of Las Vegas and am using their foulbrood strains and isolated phages along with my own foulbrood strains for research. To test each phage's host range, I grew ten phages on two different strains of American Foulbrood (AFB). Nine out of the ten phages were capable of lysing one of the AFB strains and zero were capable of lysing the other. To improve the number of bacterial strains these phages can infect, I will be evolving phages to grow on more foulbrood strains. Co-culturing phage and bacteria can broaden the phage host range (the number of strains susceptible to a phage). With this research, I hope to establish phage therapy as an efficient and effective treatment to foulbrood disease.
Phage Therapy Against Foulbrood Disease in Honey Bees
Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are the most important pollinator species in agriculture. The pollination performed by managed honey bees is essential to meet food production requirements. They are also emerging as a model system for studying animal microbiomes. In particular, anthropogenic changes to bee environments affect microbiome interactions in complex and poorly understood ways. Foulbrood is a disease caused by bacteria that infect honey bee larvae. These bacteria are deadly to colonies and difficult to eliminate, especially when regulations deter the use of antibiotics. With this situation threatening bees, isolating and evolving bacteriophages capable of killing foulbrood, a technique called phage therapy, may be a solution to eliminating this microbial disease. I acquired the freezer stocks from a similar honey bee-phage study at the University of Las Vegas and am using their foulbrood strains and isolated phages along with my own foulbrood strains for research. To test each phage's host range, I grew ten phages on two different strains of American Foulbrood (AFB). Nine out of the ten phages were capable of lysing one of the AFB strains and zero were capable of lysing the other. To improve the number of bacterial strains these phages can infect, I will be evolving phages to grow on more foulbrood strains. Co-culturing phage and bacteria can broaden the phage host range (the number of strains susceptible to a phage). With this research, I hope to establish phage therapy as an efficient and effective treatment to foulbrood disease.