Abstract

 Bacterial resistance to commonly used antibiotics is one of the major challenges to be solved today. Bacteriophage endolysins (Lysins) have become a hot research topic as a new class of antibacterial agents. They have promising applications in bacterial infection prevention and control in multiple fields, such as livestock and poultry farming, food safety, clinical medicine and pathogen detection. However, many phage endolysins display low bactericidal activities, short half-life and narrow lytic spectrums. Therefore, some methods have been used to improve the enzyme properties (bactericidal activity, lysis spectrum, stability and targeting the substrate, etc) of bacteriophage endolysins, including deletion or addition of domains, DNA mutagenesis, chimerization of domains, fusion to the membrane-penetrating peptides, fusion with domains targeting outer membrane transport systems, encapsulation, the usage of outer membrane permeabilizers. In this review, research progress on the strategies for improving their enzyme properties are systematically presented, with a view to provide references for the development of lysins with excellent performances.

Corresponding author

First author

Lab introduction

Bacterial resistance is becoming increasingly serious. Bacteriophages are viruses that specifically adsorb and lyse bacteria. Bacteriophages and their lytic enzymes have advantages such as strong specificity, exponential proliferation, wide distribution, and short research and development time, which brings new hope for the control of drug-resistant bacteria. Our research group is dedicated to the study of using bacteriophages and their lytic enzymes to prevent and control drug-resistant bacteria.

Research field

Isolation and characterization of Bacteriophages
Recombinant expression and characterization of bacteriophage lytic enzymes
Molecular modification of bacteriophage lytic enzymes