First things, Bacteriophage is a virus. Don't tell me you were thinking they are bacteria because they have the name bacteriophage? The Simple answer, it is a virus with an icosahedron head, having 20 faces and 30 edges. The head sits on a tail with leglike fibers. They are in more abundance than bacteria, as they are found everywhere including in the body, and are responsible for lots of death.
You are scared, actually, they do not cause death for humans, they are responsible for the killing of bacteria. They survive in hosts where they produce, and they prey on bacteria. When they find bacteria, they connect to the bacteria with their tail where the bacteria surface is punctured. The bacteriophage then releases genetic material into the bacteria after which the bacteriophage begins to replicate in the bacteria.
After replication, the Bacteriophage releases Endolysin which punctures or lyses the bacteria, leading to the death of the bacteria. Since bacteriophages kill bacteria, could there be a light at the end of the tunnel for humans? Bacteria were human's worst nightmare until the discovery of the fungi Penicillin. After that, we have been able to battle numerous types of bacteria, and have been able to live longer seeing that we can combat them but as usual, we always abuse things. We started to use antibiotics for everything and anything including bacteria that didn't even require antibiotics to be destroyed. This built a resistant form of bacteria known as Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria.
With antibiotic resistance bacteria, we can go back to the days were people died of bacteria infections since antibiotics will not be able to kill these bacteria, but then there are Bacteriophages that feed on bacteria. Injecting bacteriophages can be a solution since humans are immune to them. They will be used to fight bacteria that are immune to antibiotics. While this is not yet in public use, scientists are working on it, and tests have been done and they show great success.
Just when you think you have heard it all about viruses eating bacteria, then you find out that viruses also eat and destroy viruses as well. These viruses are known as virophages, and the first virophage name Sputnik was discovered by French researchers in a water tower preying on the mimivirus. These viruses prey on bigger viruses and infect them. If you haven't heard about giant viruses, do not worry, I am here to help you learn new things. Giant viruses such as the Pandoravirus, and Mimivirus (having 500 - 800nm with 12 million base pairs) were discovered in 2003, so it is possible that you haven't explored that field yet.
Let's not forget that without host cells, viruses cannot reproduce so when virophages like Sputnik virus infect the mimivirus, they do so when the large virus is in an Amoeba. So when viruses infect bacteria known as bacteriophages, there are viruses that infect viruses known as virophages. So while we look at the circle of life, humans are not the only ones at the receiving end.
Reference
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6517696/
https://jbiomedsci.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12929-022-00806-1
https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40168-019-0768-5
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6027436/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2798384/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK493185/
Hi, I am Tobi a writer, speaker, relationship blogger, and lover of good music. I love making friends and learning from people. Want to hear me speak on relationships and general life issues, you can find my youtube channel where you can listen and watch any episode for free, please do not forget to subscribe, friends. I sincerely appreciate every love I get from here, kindly do well to keep them coming.