A sneak peek into one of the latest scientific animations developed by Helix Animation team: Bacteriophages in Action - an engaging 3D visualization of the most abundant and most diverse biological entity on the planet and the never ending battle between them and their natural enemies - the bacteria.

Bacteriophages, called phages for short, were discovered independently by Frederick Twort in 1915 and Félix d’Herelle in 1917, over a decade before penicillin, the most well known antibiotic (source: SITN, Harward University).

Bacteriophage are found wherever bacterial organisms are found; that is, everywhere – in the atmosphere, in the soil, in river water and in the sea, in a direct relationship one to the other (Source: NIH).

10 interesting facts about Bacteriophages:

1. Phages are the most abundant biological entity on the planet - there are more phages on Earth than every other organism, including bacteria combined;
2. Phages are also the most diverse entity on the planet - with millions of varieties in various shapes and sizes;
3. Are they alive? ‘ The jury’s still out; they’re organic nanomachines that contain DNA or RNA and can self-assemble, but they have no intrinsic source of energy and cannot reproduce outside a host.’;
4. Phages are tiny - 10 to 100 times smaller than the average bacterium;
5. We absorb about 30 billion phages into our bodies every day;
6. All the phage’s genetic material is squeezed under enormous pressure - up to 50 atmospheres - into a protein shell called a capsid;
7. Phages cause a collective trillion trillion successful infections per second, in the process destroying up to 40 per cent of all bacterial cells in the ocean every single day;
8. Researchers have suggested that ocean phages may turn over as much as 150 gigatons of carbon per year. But because we know so little about them, they’re not included in global climate models;
9. Scientists can currently only identify ~10-20 per cent of the genes in a given phage. Phage genomes evolve extremely rapidly, and scientists think there’s a huge amount of gene transfer between phages, bacteria and eukaryotic cells;
10. All of the basic molecular biology tools that are used every day in the lab - DNA polymerase, restriction enzymes, CRISPR - came from phage research.

Source: LENS, Monash University 

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