DOI: 10.1177/26416549261461823 ISSN: 2641-6530
Discovery, Induction, and Screening of Prophages in Clinical
Acinetobacter baumannii
Isolates
Jessica Trinh, Vivek K. Mutalik, Catherine M. Mageeney
Background:
Acinetobacter baumannii
is a common bacterial pathogen in nosocomial infections. It has become one of the greatest threats to human health for its growing resistance to “last resort” antibiotics, which has led to a revival of phage therapy as a potential treatment. However, conventional methods for isolating
A. baumannii
-infecting phages are labor-intensive and often unsuccessful.
Methods:
Our approach involves a computational pipeline to identify temperate phages (prophages) integrated into
A. baumannii
genomes, followed by mitomycin C (MMC) induction of those strains to screen for active prophages.
Results:
Here we show a prophage analysis for nearly 900
A. baumannii
genomes. We observed MMC-triggered excision of nine prophages from eight
A. baumannii
strains by Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) and sequencing. Further, we show four prophage-formed virions detectable by transmission electron microscopy and two that can plaque on other
A. baumannii
isolates.
Conclusion:
This work demonstrates the utility and diversity of prophages for further development as therapeutics for antibiotic-resistant
A. baumannii
.