In a recent study, Bagchi and her colleagues discovered that together, silver nanoparticles scaffolded onto phages killed bacteria more potently than either component alone.

This suggests that the conjugates may be a new, promising weapon in the fight against antibiotic resistance.

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In a recent study, researchers wanted to “take advantage of both worlds,” said Damayanti Bagchi, a material chemist who led the work as a postdoctoral researcher in Irene Chen’s laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles.¹ For the first time, Bagchi and her colleagues synthesized silver nanoparticles using phages called M13, which they also used as a scaffold for the nanoparticles. The silver particle and M13 phage conjugate killed bacteria more effectively than each component alone. The conjugate also slowed down the development of bacterial resistance. This work, published in Langmuir, expands researchers’ arsenal of weapons in their fight against antibiotic resistance.

“This is quite new, using phages as scaffolds [for silver nanoparticles]. I find it very exciting,” said Timea Fernandez, a biochemist at Winthrop University who was not involved in the study.

Antibiotics are no longer able to treat infections as effectively as they once did because many pathogens have developed resistance to these drugs. This phenomenon, known as antimicrobial resistance (AMR), claims over a million lives worldwide each year.

Scientists have long been searching for treatments to overcome AMR, and a discovery by researchers at the University of California takes a significant step forward. The team has developed a new type of silver nanoparticle (AgNP) that is much more effective against harmful bacteria and significantly slows the rise of antibiotic resistance.

The AgNP was designed with M13 phage—a rod-shaped virus that infects E. coli bacteria—as the biological template for particle growth, resulting in a potency 30 times higher than that of commercially purchased silver nanoparticles.

At European XFEL, researchers have observed in detail how the vital iron protein ferritin makes its way in highly dense environments—with implications for medicine and nanotechnology.

Inside biological cells, there is a dense crowd where millions of proteins move side by side, bump into each other or temporarily accumulate. At the same time, these proteins often have to fulfill important tasks at short notice. How exactly the proteins move in this confined space has been difficult to track until now.

An international research team led by Anita Girelli and Fivos Perakis, both from Stockholm University, has now used the European XFEL X-ray laser in Schenefeld near Hamburg to take a closer look at these movements—and discovered a surprising pattern. The results are published in Nature Communications.