To date, numerous antibacterial agents have been developed to overcome various bacterial infections.However, drug-resistant bacteria have emerged for which antibacterial agents do not work against almost all antibacterial agents used clinically.The development of new antibacterial agents has not progressed, and the treatment of drug-resistant bacterial infections has become increasingly difficult.The problem of drug-resistant bacteria is being addressed in various countries around the world as an urgent issue.

　CRISPR-Cas13a is an RNA-degraded ribonuclear protein complex and is expected to be applied in various fields such as RNA editing, gene therapy, and genetic testing.This study revealed that it has biological activity to cleave and kill RNA and can selectively kill drug-resistant bacteria.Therefore, CRISPR-Cas13a designed to recognize drug resistance genes is installed in bacteriophage, which is a virus that infects bacteria.As a result, we succeeded in producing a preparation that can selectively sterilize the targeted bacteria, and named this new antibacterial preparation an antibacterial capsid.

　Antibacterial capsid enables antibacterial treatment for infectious diseases caused by resistant bacteria that cannot be treated with conventional antibacterial drugs, and infections caused by toxin-producing bacteria that cannot use antibacterial drugs.In addition, conventional bacterial genetic testing is based on nucleic acid amplification methods such as PCR, but antibacterial capsids do not require specific equipment, so bacterial genetic testing can be performed inexpensively and easily.Furthermore, it may be used for the death of cancer cells and the removal of virus-infected cells due to the mechanism that induces cell death in a gene sequence-specific manner.

Paper information:[Nature Communications] Development of CRISPR-Cas13a-based antimicrobials capable of sequence-specific killing of target bacteria