Reprogramming Bacteria for Symbiont Conversion: A Review
Bacteria are prokaryotic cells some of which have positive effects upon the human organism and some of which have negative effects. I coined the term “symbiont conversion” for methods that convert, or reprogram, bacteria (and other cells, such as tumor cells) that have a negative effect to cells that have a positive effect. With such methods the urgent problem of antibiotic resistance could be solved. [Volko2025] This short paper is about such methods, but in a more broad context – I want to review different approaches towards the reprogramming of bacteria and not necessarily in the context of symbiont conversion, although symbiont conversion is the motivation for doing this literature survey. Basically a literature survey shows that there are two different approaches towards the reprogramming of bacteria: On the one hand, bacteria can be reprogrammed by altering their genes, for example by using bacteriophages (viruses that target bacteria) or methods like CRISPR/Cas9. These approache...