Salmonella enterica is one of the top causes of enteric disease in Canada and worldwide. One of the most common reservoirs of Salmonella enterica is in chickens. Previously, Salmonella enterica was controlled in chickens using antibiotics, but due to the development of resistance to multiple antibiotics in strains, new methods must be found to control them. Bacteriophages, viruses to bacteria, are one such method. This paper aimed to characterize the host range of two bacteriophages against seven Salmonella enterica serotypes isolated from BC poultry environments to see if either phage would be appropriate for usage in live chicken trials or on chicken meat. Single step growth curves at 41 °C, pH 5.7, and with a multiplicity of infection of 0.01 were conducted for 2 hours in tryptic soy broth in triplicate for each phage-host combination to identify which isolates each phage was capable of bursting. The soft agar overlay assay was conducted with 17±1 hours of incubation at 37 °C in triplicate to quantify the burst delay, burst time, and burst size for each combination, and paired two-tailed t-tests were conducted to determine if there was a significant difference between the initial phage concentration and final phage concentration. It was found that SE11 was only capable of bursting isolate S7 (p = 0.017), with a burst delay of 30 minutes and a burst time of 30 minutes. SE13 was found to be able to burst 4 isolates (p < 0.05), with a burst delay of 30 minutes, a burst time of 30-50 minutes. From these results, SE13 should be considered for further analysis in S. enterica control.
David Dennison (Thu,) studied this question.