本文选自《经济学人》1月16日刊文章。微观世界奥妙无穷，再小的细菌都是一个宇宙，充满无限智慧，有众多无解之谜。最新发现，噬菌体也会搭乘一些细菌的便车，来找到另一些细菌，并攻击它们，来实现自身生存。病毒和细菌之间的这种伙伴关系是否可能用于医疗目的，还需要进行进一步研究，但它为有效利用噬菌体为人类服务，找到了一种途径。
选文精讲
Viruses hitch lifts on some bacteria, the better to kill others病毒会搭上一些细菌的便车，从而更好地杀死另一些细菌
A hitchhiker’s guide to the microverse
NOWADAYS, PATHOGENIC bacteria are generally dealt with using antibiotics. But some researchers argue that bactericidal viruses called bacteriophages should be added to the armory. One reason they have not found favour so far is that they are hard to deliver to their targets. However, Yu Pingfeng at Rice University in Texas and Zhu Liang at Zhejiang University in China may have found a way around that. As they report in Environmental Science and Technology, they have discovered that some phages can hitch lifts with certain bacterial species that they do not attack, to bring them to places rich in those that they do.
- pathogenic bacteria：致病菌、病原菌
如今，病原菌一般都用抗生素来应对。但是一些研究人员认为，一种叫做噬菌体的杀菌病毒应该被列入抵抗病原菌的武器库中。但到目前为止，他们还没有得到支持，原因之一是他们很难实现自己的目标。然而，德克萨斯州莱斯大学的于平峰和中国浙江大学的朱亮可能已经找到了一种解决办法。正如他们在《环境科学与技术》杂志上报道的那样，他们发现一些噬菌体可以搭乘它们不攻击的某些细菌的便车，通过这些细菌把这些噬菌体带到富含它们所攻击的细菌种类的地方。As is often the way with intriguing findings, Dr Yu and Dr Zhu made this discovery by chance. They were studying microbe communities in treatment plants for waste water, and noticed that phages in these miniature ecosystems sometimes attached themselves to species of bacteria equipped with flagella. These are rotating, helical appendages which act as propellers, so flagellate bacteria are more mobile than those lacking such equipment. To the two researchers, the behaviour of the phages looked a lot like hitchhiking, so they conducted some experiments to find out what was happening.
正如很多有趣的发现经常会发生的那样，于博士和朱博士的这一发现纯属偶然。他们在研究污水处理厂中的微生物群落时，注意到这些微型生态系统中的噬菌体有时会附着在带有鞭毛的细菌上，它们是旋转的螺旋状附器，起着推进器的作用，所以带鞭毛的细菌比那些没有这种配置的细菌更容易移动。对这两位研究人员来说，噬菌体的行为看起来很像搭便车，因此他们进行了一些实验来弄清发生了什么。
