Wild lytic bacteriophages: a potential enhancer of disinfectants’ biofilm inhibition in bio-industrial settings for fruit fly production

The pathogenic nature of Morganella morganii to fruit flies has been described earlier; its biofilm prevents the larvae of mass reared fruit flies from proceeding to their next life stage by trapping them in their polymeric matrix. For the Mediterranean ( Ceratitis capitata ) fruit fly (“medfly”) mass rearing plants, this can be problem, due to losses generated in the production process. The presence of this bacteria is prevented by using different disinfectants, by themselves, or combined, which can act as selective pressure for the biofilm to resist the disinfectants. In this paper, we propose a method to isolate lytic bacteriophages and use them as quorum quenchers, to prevent microbial consortium from forming biofilms. When tried as viral cocktails, a very significant reduction of biofilm was found. However, when used with one of the two tried industrial disinfectants, the viral effect wasn’t as significant. When interpreted alongside the first experiments, this result opens the door to use bacteriophages to reduce the minimum inhibitory concentration necessary of the disinfectant. A reduction of said concentration would translate into less selective pressure for a resistance against it, and a reduction in costs for the mass rearing process at the time of implementation of the system.