Phage therapy of coral disease

By R. Efrony, Yossi Loya, Eran Bacharach, Eugene Rosenberg. Coral reefs, 2007

95 citations recorded by the source corpus.

At present there are no known procedures for preventing or treating infectious diseases of corals. Toward this end, the use of phage therapy has been investigated. Lytic bacteriophages (phages) were isolated for two bacterial pathogens that are responsible for coral diseases, Vibrio coralliilyticus, which is the causative agent of bleaching and tissue lysis of Pocillopora damicornis, and Thalosomonas loyaeana, which causes the white plague-like disease of Favia favus. By using these phages in controlled aquaria experiments, it was demonstrated that each of these diseases could be controlled by the pathogen-specific phage. The data indicate that initially the phages bind to the pathogen in seawater and are then brought to the coral surface where they multiply and lyse the pathogen. The phages remained associated with the coral and could prevent subsequent infections. These data suggest that phage therapy has the potential to control the spread of infectious coral diseases.

Subfields: Ecology, Immunology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0d166792e25f95a59c88d69712aec474db060c8e

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Citations in the corpus

The Hologenome Concept: Human, Animal and Plant Microbiota (2014, background): “For example, 103 phages per ml were sufficient to prevent the infection of corals with 106 bacterial pathogens per ml (Efrony et al. 2007).”
Viruses in aquatic ecosystems: important advancements of the last 20 years and prospects for the future in the field of microbial oceanography and limnology (2010, background): “[209], bacteriophages were isolated from two types of bacterial pathogens: (1) Vibrio coralliilyticus, which causes Advances in Oceanography and Limnology 121”