Maggot microRNA: A new inhibitory pathway to bacterial infection

Refractory bacterial infectious diseases are clinically common and troublesome in the treatment. The traditional antibiotics could not be used to control bacterial infection with the indiscriminate use or abuse of drugs. Maggot therapy is a simple and highly successful method for healing of drug-resistant bacterial infected and necrotic wounds. It has been proved maggot can reduce the bacterial load within wounds effectively. However, the anti-bacterial mechanism of maggot is not clear. So far, most previous researches only focus on the anti-bacterial peptides from maggot, ignoring other possible anti-bacterial molecules such as nucleotides. MicroRNAs are endogenous small non-coding RNAs that can bind to the 3'-untranslated regions of the messenger RNA of the target genes. The binding by imperfect base pairing leads to post-transcriptional gene silencing, so that the expression of target gene is down-regulated. Combined understand of maggot and microRNA theory may give us a new method inhibiting bacteria growth and treating infectious diseases. It is hypothesized that finding an effective microRNA from maggot to down-regulate expression of bacteria pathogenic protein may open a new window to cure clinical infectious diseases.