54-thermostable lysin for perfringens

Steven Swift (Beltsville Agricultural Research Center) and colleagues have engineered a chimeric phage lysin that lyses Clostridium perfringens, an important poultry pathogen. They fused the cell wall binding domain of a C. perfringens phage lysin to the enzymatic domain of a Geobacillus phage lysin (a deep-sea thermophilic phage). This resulted in a thermostable C. perfringens-specific lysin that may be able to be added to poultry feed to control this pathogen.