In alternative embodiments, provided are compositions, products of manufacture and methods for treating, ameliorating and preventing infections, disorders and conditions in animals including: delivering a (i) bacteriophage (ii) prophage, the phagemid or phage-like particle, (iii) general transducing agent (GTA), or small, tailed bacteriophage-like particle, (iv) Metamorphosis Associated Contractile structure (MACs) or (v) phage-derived product into a tissue, or the blood stream or lymphatic system of the animal, e.g., the mammal; or delivering to a tissue or organ of the animal; or treating a bacterial or viral infection in the animal; generating an immune response in the animal; or treating a disease or condition in an individual in need thereof; or delivering a payload or a composition, e.g., in vivo, to the animal, or labelling, tagging or coating a cell in vivo in the animal.

Disclosed herein are methods and systems for rapid detection of microorganisms in a sample. A genetically modified bacteriophage is also disclosed which comprises an indicator gene in the late gene region. The specificity of the bacteriophage, such as CBA120, allows detection of a specific microorganism, such as E. coli O157:H7, and an indicator signal may be amplified to optimize assay sensitivity.

The present invention is directed to a method for producing bacteriophages infecting a bacterial host such as Flavobacterium columnare or Aeromonas sp, the method comprising the steps of adding the bacterium to a sterile culture medium supplemented with mucin or another mucus component, incubating said culture medium, thereby obtaining a bacterial culture, optionally collecting the supernatant containing floating (planktonic) bacterial cells from said culture and transferring the supernatant to a new container in order to discard most of the biofilm and adding a bacteriophage infecting the bacterium to said bacterial culture obtained from a previous step, and incubating the culture until the phage yield increases or peaks. The method can also be used for preparing modified enrichment cultures for optimized phage isolation. Addition of mucin to soft-agar culture medium is proposed as an optimized technique for viral titration. This invention also covers all relevant steps in setting up a phage therapy product: phage production, phage quantification and phage isolation.

Compositions and methods are provided for preventing, ameliorating, or treating a disease caused by a species of bacterial genus Vibrio, for example, cholera caused by V. cholerae, the compositions containing two or more strains of lytic bacteriophage that infect and kill Vibrio cells. The bacteriophage are virulent, which replicate intracellularly and lyse and kill the bacteria. Use of two or more strains in a single treatment, as a result of a rate of mutation of the bacteria to simultaneous resistance to all of the bacteriophage to be so low as to be negligible, reduces appearance of phage-resistant bacteria to statistical negligibility. Normal human microbial flora species were not affected. In alternative embodiments of the method and the composition, antibiotic agents or other treatment agents can be administered with a cocktail of the plurality of bacteriophage strains.

Disclosed herein are compositions, methods, kits and systems for rapid detection of microorganisms using a reproduction-deficient indicator bacteriophage. The specificity of such reproduction-deficient indicator bacteriophage for binding and infecting particular microorganisms of interest allows targeted and sensitive detection of a microorganism of interest.

The present invention provides a gene including an M13 p5 expressing cassette, which includes a promoter, a ribosome binding site (RBS) and a protein 5 (p5) coding region, wherein at least one base of sequences between the RBS and the p5 coding region is mutated. Using this gene may increase production of single-stranded DNA.

A modified bacteriophage capable of infecting a plurality of different target bacteria, which bacteriophage includes a toxin gene encoding a toxin protein which is toxic to the target bacteria; wherein the bacteriophage is lytic; and wherein the bacteriophage expresses host range determinant proteins which have a plurality of bacterial host specificities.

The invention relates to the field of microbiology, specifically to an antimicrobial composition comprising a first and a second bacteriophage, wherein the composition has lytic activity against E. coli O157. The invention further relates to a use of the antimicrobial composition for controlling bacterial contamination in a food- or feed environment on or in food- or feed processing equipment or food- or feed containers or in a food- or feed product.

The present invention provides a virulent Pseudomonas fluorescens (P. fluorescens) phage Pf1901, and a phage Pf1901 preparation and an application thereof, and relates to the technical field of phage. The virulent P. fluorescens phage Pf1901 has an accession number of CCTCC M2019447. The virulent phage Pf1901 has a titer of (1.43)10.sup.10 PFU/mL. The virulent phage Pf1901 has an optimal multiplicity of infection (MOI) value of 0.0001. The virulent P. fluorescens phage Pf1901 provided by the present invention exhibits very high specificity and lytic ability to P. fluorescens, which can be used to control P. fluorescens, with strong lytic and scavenging effects on a host.

The present invention relates to bacteriophage therapy. More particularly, the present invention relates to novel bacteriophages having a high specificity against Pseudomonas aeruginosa strains, their manufacture, components thereof, compositions comprising the same and the uses thereof in phage therapy.