Bacteriophages are viruses that infect/kill bacteria as part of their natural programming. Just like a typical viral infection may give you a sore throat, using a mechanism of infecting the cells in your throat by inserting RNA/DNA into your cells causing your body's immune system to fight back by killing the infected cells - bacteriophages infect bacteria and make them produce more of its viral clones and/or they end up killing the bacteria they infect.
We've known about bacteriophages for a long time and today we use them to insert genetically engineered fragments of DNA into cells so they start expressing the new genes. This is standard practice in genetics labs nowadays.
But up until 2 or 3 years ago we had not come across Virophages - a virus that infects another virus! How such a discovery managed to slip by silently without anyone making a big hoohah about it is crazy!
I'm only speculating that one application of gene therapy using virophages might be, and I haven't given this much thought, is to infect a genetically modified stalwart virus similar to HIV to continually produce a virus that carries a beneficial gene such as the CFTR-coding gene to help sufferers of systic fibrosis. You stick the infected virus into a human being and it starts creating the virus that carries the gene to cure the disease or at least to provide consistent and longer-lasting gene therapy.
The possibilities and applications of this discovery have great potential. Here's an article nature published a few days ago in which I first found out about virophages: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110328/full/news.2011.188.html
As we're on the subject of microbes, I'd like to take the opportunity to publically complain about Leeds Central Library which has no books on bacteria in its catalogue! (unless they're hiding them somewhere!)
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