The Antibacterial Power of Blue Light

Blue light is a cleansing light that has been found in many studies to have an anti-pathogenic effect. Here it is shown to be effective in inhibiting growth of Staph bacteria at the RNA level which is exciting because it is the mutation of the RNA that keeps organisms like Staph thriving and hard to treat. Blue light here is being offered as a possible solution for antibiotic resistant organisms. 465 nm is the same spectrum we like to work with. Another great reason to shine with blue light.
Genom Data. 2016 May 26;9:4-6. doi: 10.1016/j.gdata.2016.05.011. eCollection 2016.

RNA-Seq reveals changes in the Staphylococcus aureus transcriptome following blue light illumination.

Abstract

In an effort to better understand the mechanism by which blue light inhibits the growth of Staphylococcus aureus in culture, a whole transcriptome analysis of S. aureus isolate BUSA2288 was performed using RNA-Seq to analyze the differential gene expression in response to blue light exposure. RNA was extracted from S. aureus cultures pooled from 24 1 ml well samples that were each illuminated with a dose of 250 J/cm(2) of 465 nm blue light and from control cultures grown in the dark. Complementary DNA libraries were generated from enriched mRNA samples and sequenced using the Illumina MiSeq Next Generation Sequencer. Here we report one type of analysis that identified 32 candidate genes for further investigation. Blue light has been shown to be bactericidal against S. aureus and is a potential alternative therapy for antibiotic resistant organisms. The mechanism for the inactivation of bacteria is hypothesized to involve reactive oxygen species. These RNA-Seq results provide data that may be used to test this hypothesis. The RNA-Seq data generated by these experiments is deposited in Gene Expression Omnibus (Gene accession GSE62055) and may be found at NCBI (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE62055).

KEYWORDS:

MRSA; Phototherapy; RNA-seq; Reactive oxygen intermediates; Staphylococcus aureus

PMID:
27330994
PMCID:
PMC4906118
DOI:
10.1016/j.gdata.2016.05.011
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