>>> Събитието ще се проведе на английски. The event will be held in English <<<
Join us on 2nd Feb when we will talk about merciless killers – the bacteriophages, small biological machines designed to kill bacteria 🙂
Prokaryotic organisms (bacteria and archae) were the first forms of life that managed to create a developed biosphere on our planet about 3 billion years ago. Since this ancient time, prokaryotic organisms are associated with numerous viruses that influence all the facets of the complex life of the microbes including their interactions with eukaryotic macroorganisms, such as animals and humans. Amongst those are some of the most marvelous and numerous of nature’s creations which are in essence small molecular machines that kill bacteria – the so called “bacteriophages”.
The research on bacterial viruses – bacteriophages, largely laid the foundations of molecular biology and gave rise to the modern concept of the virus. The use of bacteriophages to combat pathogenic bacteria was also one of the first therapy for infectious diseases though it was mostly abandoned in the West in the 1940s in favor of the advancing antibiotic treatments.
After decades of wide use of antibiotics, nowadays we are confronted with a massive health crisis caused by the rapid spread of the multidrug-resistant strains of bacteria that threatens to drive us back into the pre-antibiotic era. This global challenge urged the scientific and medical community to reconsider the hundred-years old approach of phage therapy. This event will give an overview of the main principles of the bacteriophage ecology and discuss the implications in the phage therapy.
Andrey Letarov is the head of the laboratory of Microbial viruses at Winogradsky Institute of Microbiology RC Biotechnology RAS, Moscow, Russia. He is also a professor at Virology department of the faculty of biology of Lomonosov Moscow State University.
During his whole scientific career he was studying various aspect of bacteriophage biology, including organization and folding of phage proteins, bacteriophage evolution, bacteriophage diversity and ecology. His current research is mainly focused on molecular mechanisms of the host cell recognition and bacteriophage ecology in natural microbial system with high density of life, including symbiotic microbiota of the mammal animals’ gut. Andrey is an author of numerous research papers and recently published a book summarizing the current state-of-the-art in bacteriophage biology. He frequently gives popular lectures on different topics of virology and microbiology.