Marina Papaianni
University of Naples Federico II, Italy
Title: Phage therapy: An emerging tool against human and plants bacterial infection
Biography
Biography: Marina Papaianni
Abstract
Bacteria are under constant attack by bacteriophages (phages), the most abundant life forms in the biosphere. This work describes how the phage therapy is an efficient way to contrast the bacterial infection regardless the host. Here we describe the activity of phage in both plant and chicken meat. All the experiment carried out are with phage complex whit the hydroxyapatite, since many years, hydroxyapatite is being explored as vehicle for drug targeting, transfection, bone scaffolds and implant coating materials and for these reasons we evaluated the effect of this mineral for the bacteriophage therapy. At first, we validated the antimicrobial activity of the phage and its possible direct administration into the plant xylem. We next performed both in vivo and in vitro experiments to assess the activity of the bacteriophage in association with hydroxyapatite; Secondly, we demonstrate that the hydroxyapatite/ bacteriophage complex was able to reduce the bacterial load of Salmonella Rissen in previously infected minced meat, respect to bacteriophage or hydroxyapatite alone.