Natural Mechanisms for Controlling Disease
Disease causing bacteria have been traditionally controlled by disinfectants and antibiotics. Each of these methods has the drawback of producing mutants that are resistant to antibiotics and resistant to disinfection. The evolution of multi-drug resistant bacteria has outpaced the production of new antibiotics to control them, and dangerous bacterial strains such as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) have become frequent and frightening topics in the daily news. Combined with the fact that research and development of new antibiotics is prohibitively expensive, this represents a major threat to public health for human beings, and also has numerous agricultural consequences as well.

Bacteriophages
Bacteriophages are naturally occurring viruses that are widespread in nature, exquisitely specific for particular hosts, and harmless to other organisms in the environment. They reproduce themselves by infecting their bacterial host, using the host cell to reproduce large numbers of copies of themselves, and then the new bacteriophage copies are released by breaking open, or lysing, the host cell. The net effect is that the bacterial cell is rapidly killed when it releases the new copies of the bacteriophage.

Lysins
Bacteriophages use enzymes called lysins that specifically break down bacterial cell walls. These enzymes provide specific and effective means of destroying particular bacterial cells, including harmful, pathogenic strains.