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Bacterial Predation: Natural Guns to Control Infection

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New Weapons to Control Bacterial Growth

Abstract

From the Paleolithic until the twentieth century, infectious diseases were the main scourge of mankind. Vaccination, treatment of infectious diseases with antibiotics, and water purification have contributed to enormous improvements in the quality and length of the human life span. However, since it is difficult to design new vaccines to protect us against a wide variety of microbial pathogens and the spread of antibiotic-resistant pathogens poses additional difficulties, new alternative treatments for infectious diseases are needed. Environmental bacteria can be killed by predation from bacteriophages, heterotrophic protists, and predatory bacteria. We present in this review these bacterial natural predators to envisage their potential usefulness in fighting pathogens from the environment and/or from infected animal hosts. Protists are generalist grazers of prokaryotes, bacteriophages mostly highly host-specific and predatory bacteria collectively known as the Bdellovibrio and bdello-like organisms (BALOs), are neither true generalists nor hard-core specialists. Recently, “natural” non-predatory microorganisms are also being studied to treat a wide variety of human diseases, including gastrointestinal disorders, urinary infections, osteoporosis, and cancer. We “simply” should observe nature. As Joshua Lederberg remembered, taking August Krogh principle, “for any given scientific challenge there is a critter fittest toward its solution”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Microbiology and Parasitology, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Mercedes Berlanga

  2. Department of Pathology and Experimental Pathology, Medical School, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Miguel Viñas & Ricardo Guerrero

  3. CESPU INNFACTS, Gandra, Portugal

    Miguel Viñas

  4. Barcelona Knowledge Hub-Academia Europaea, Barcelona, Spain

    Ricardo Guerrero

Authors
  1. Mercedes Berlanga
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  2. Miguel Viñas
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  3. Ricardo Guerrero
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Correspondence to Mercedes Berlanga .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Santiago de Compostel, Santiago de Compostela, Spain

    Tomas G. Villa

  2. Faculty of Medicine, University of Barcelona, L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Spain

    Miguel Vinas

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Berlanga, M., Viñas, M., Guerrero, R. (2016). Bacterial Predation: Natural Guns to Control Infection. In: Villa, T., Vinas, M. (eds) New Weapons to Control Bacterial Growth. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28368-5_18

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