Hi everyone,

Hope y’all are doing well and flinging right through spring.

Jessica’s been doing well at Paul Bollyky’s lab, continuing her work on filamentous phages, peeking into the world of phage display, and exploring cell and gene therapy. Hit her up if you’re also going to the ASGCT conference in NOLA in May!

As for me, in case y’all haven’t heard, I’ve been stepping outside the phage, bioinformatics, and microbiology world, to work at an AI company called Groq. Groq provides a way for developers to easily build AI-features like text-to-speech, audio transcription, and summarization. Hopefully, over the next few months, I’ll have time to release some free tools for the research community, like multi-lingual Pubmed search, so stay tuned!

We’ll also be exploring some more short-form and AI-assisted article formats, as we’re growing shorter and shorter on free time!

But for the moment, Phage Directory continues to live on as a blog, and Jessica has some interesting papers she’s been adding to the pipeline.

~ Jan

For this month, here’s what we published:

Our Phage Picks for April 2025

by Jessica Sacher, Jan Zheng

Continuing our favorite format, Jess picked her most-used phage labs methods papers. The first paper is her favorite phage production protocol, “Phage on Tap,” which prepares high-titer phage stocks within two days (we used this in Australia). The second paper is a qPCR-based phage quantification method. As a bonus, I’ve been reading the excellent biotech/AI blog OwlPosting, and found a curious post about optogenetics, and how it’s always been promising, but never really took off (sounds familiar?)

Does every scientist need an AI co-scientist?

by Jessica Sacher

In this Podovirus podcast recap, Jessica shares highlights from a conversation about Google’s new “AI co-scientist” tool (still in beta testing). Two Imperial College London phage researchers José Penadés and Tiago Costa have been the first to test this tool — they gave it a bunch of data surrounding a complex phage biology question (regarding PICIs — a type of phage parasite) that took them years to explain. The AI suggested the same key experiments they’d eventually landed on after years of chasing other threads, which made them all contemplate the role of AI in science. While I think AI-based experimental “auto-suggestion” is incredibly useful (and getting better by the month) — the real scientific work is still being achieved in the lab, the old-school way.

Tips from the lab: Rapid lab hacks

by Jessica Sacher

Here’s a new format! ‘Tips from the lab’ intends to be a new format for sharing concise yet effective ideas for getting the lab in order. This is the stuff people learn the hard way, but that don’t make it into protocols. In the first issue, Jess covered: how to improve phage purification, how to prevent cross-contamination, chromatography techniques for filamentous phages, and tricks for checking in on plaque assays and boosting phage production. Oh and if you have your own hacks, we want to share them!! Email us!

Lessons from viral vectors, CAR-T, & RNA

Throwback: In light of Jessica going to the cell & gene therapy conference, here’s a good throwback that fits the subject!

~ Jan & Jessica