Isolation Morphological and Genomic Characterization of Lytic Bacteriophages Specific to Bacterial Pathogens Threatening Fish Health in Aquacultures
Project no. 21359 · Status: Kapanmış · 2019
Summary
<p>Aquaculture is a rapidly developing production sector in our country. However, bacterial infectious diseases have become the biggest problem of aquaculture. The main reason for this situation is the diseases caused by multi-drug resistant pathogen species and the related economic losses. Concerns of the industry on fish health and quality have led us to seek alternative methods to antibiotics in this regard. Recently, as an alternative to the use of antibiotics, the focus has been on an approach called phage therapy, which is based on destroying pathogenic bacteria using their natural enemies, bacteriophages. The isolation and characterization of lytic bacteriophages specific to fish-pathogenic bacteria were carried out within the scope of this project, which was carried out in cooperation with Kılıç Seafood Inc. Didim Hatchery and Adaptation Facility and Ege University. Then, the potential of using phages as antibacterial agents was evaluated by bacterial inactivation experiments. As a result, 13 bacteriophages with proven lytic effects on fish pathogens (V. ordalii, P. damselae, A. veronii) were isolated. Five of the isolates (PdF-15, IKEMvK, IKEMv14, AvF-5 and AvF-6) showed phage therapy potential due to their specificity and bacteriocidal effect against the target pathogen. In addition, qPCR was performed with the probe-primer pair designed specifically for the AvF-6 phage genome, and it was concluded that accurate and reproducible determination of phage titers is possible with qPCR.</p>