Eli5 what are phages (the medical alternative to antibiotics) and how do they work?

Question

Eli5 what are phages (the medical alternative to antibiotics) and how do they work?

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Answer 1

Short for bacteriophages. They’re viruses that can dock to bacteria to inject DNA or RNA to kill the bacterial (and reproduce more phages). The DNA/RNA are instructions to take over the bacteria’s cellular machinery to produce more phages, at which point it produces a ton of them, blows up (this is how it dies), and spreads more phages to attack other bacteria to repeat the process.

When I learned about these as a kid, I thought it was like a starship docking vessel that attached to main ships and sent in troops to take it over to produce more small docking vessels. I watched and played too many Star Wars games…

Sometimes you can keep the phage body and load in different RNA/DNA instructions. Pretty cool stuff. Maybe one day we can use it to treat cancer since phages can be retro-fitted to attach only cancer cells and not our own (with DNA/RNA instructions to only kill cancer cells).