C&T Round Up for June 2022!

Issue 182 | July 1, 2022

3 min read

This week, we highlight the feature articles we published in June! Learn about what happened when the Phage Australia team shipped a phage around the country, Jean-Paul Pirnay’s views on phage therapy, and how producing phages has changed over the years.

Urgent June 23, 2022

Urgent need for Serratia phages for a patient in the USA

Phage Therapy

We are urgently seeking Serratia phages for a patient in the USA

Ways to help at this stage:

By sending your phages for testing on the patient’s strain
By receiving the strain and testing your phages
By receiving the strain and using it to search for new phages against the organism
By offering to prepare phages supplied by others to clinical grade
By helping spread the word about this request
By providing us with names/email addresses of labs you think we should contact

Please email [email protected] if you can help in any way, or if you would like further details/clarification.

Let’s make a difference,
Phage Directory

What’s New

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Phase Genomics raised $5.5M from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation & NIH to catalog the viruses that infect bacteria. The resulting database could be used to develop new therapeutics & build a surveillance system to detect & respond to microbial threats.

Paper: Identification of phage receptor-binding protein sequences with hidden markov models and an extreme gradient boosting classifier. Twitter thread: ‘AI vs. bioinformatics’ — find out which one won!.

Tool: Pharokka, a dedicated fast phage annotation tool inspired by prokka. Pharokka is designed for users who want one-line, rapid, standarised and scalable phage annotations, much like prokka for prokaryotes.

Paper: Thousands of small, novel genes predicted in global phage genomes.

Blog: Using viruses to treat antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections | National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Latest Jobs

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Postdoc at University of Jyväskylä, Finland, with demonstrated experience in microbial/cell cultures, genetic analyses, and/or understanding in phage resistance and CRISPR-Cas adaptation studies in bacteria to join the international research project “Ecology of bacteriophages in mucosa during vertebrate host lifespan”.

Postdoc at University of Nebraska-Lincoln to focus on the development of a live attenuated unmarked vaccine against Johne’s disease. The primary duties and responsibilities are molecular cell biology, molecular genetics, and microbiology approaches (e.g., RT-PCR, plasmid construction, phage propagation, etc.)

Research Support Officer: University of Leicester. The Phage Lab Research Group headed by Prof Martha Clokie is seeking a Research Support Officer to help manage human and agricultural phage research projects, and help progress projects through pre-clinical and clinical development.

Postdoc in the laboratory of Prof. Marek Basler at the Biozentrum of University of Basel to unravel novel phenotypes related to type 6 secretion system activity.

Research Fellow in the lab of John Chen at the National University of Singapore, to study the molecular basis of Staphylococcus aureus pathogenesis. Interests of the lab are focused on phages, pathogenicity islands, and other mobile genetic elements.

Community Board

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Anyone can post a message to the phage community — and it could be anything from collaboration requests, post-doc searches, sequencing help — just ask!

PhageSuisse is hosting a phage webinar with by Prof. Lars Fieseler from the Institute of Food and Beverage Innovation in Zurich and Wädenswil, Switzerland. He will give a talk about synergy between Erwinia amylovora tailspike protein and phage.

C&T Round Up for June 2022!

Phage microbiologist and co-founder of Phage Directory

Co-founderPostdoctoral Researcher

Iredell Lab, Phage Directory, The Westmead Institute for Medical Research, Sydney, Australia, Phage Australia

Email [email protected]

Twitter @JessicaSacher

Website https://phage.ca

Skills

Phage characterization, Phage-host interactions, Phage Therapy, Molecular Biology

I’m a co-founder of Phage Directory and have a Ph.D in Microbiology and Biotechnology from the University of Alberta (I studied Campylobacter phage biology). For Phage Directory, I oversee community building, phage sourcing, communications, science, and our awesome team of volunteers.

As of Feb 2022, I’ve recently joined Jon Iredell’s group in Sydney, Australia as a postdoctoral research scientist for the Phage Australia project. I’m diving back into the lab to help get Phage Australia’s country-wide phage therapy system up and running here, working to streamline workflows for phage sourcing, biobanking and collection of phage/bacteria/patient matching and monitoring data, and integrating it all with Phage Directory’s phage exchange, phage alerts and phage atlas systems. I’m also delving into phage manufacturing and quality control.

In this month’s Capsid & Tail Monthly Round Up issue, we’re highlighting the three feature articles we published in June. Be sure to check them out if you missed them, and let us know if you have thoughts, comments or questions! Reach us anytime by email or Slack!

Phage down under: stability of a travelling phage, a blog post by Stephanie Lynch
Phage therapy at the Queen Astrid Military Hospital: a conversation with Jean-Paul Pirnay, an interview by Madhav Madurantakam Royam
Producing phages consistently: then and now, a blog post and interview by Kyle Jackson

C&T Throwback!

There’s lots of great phage stuff in the C&T archive! Check out this article on PhageUGAL Summer School: Infecting Romanian research with phage by Colin Buttimer, Andrei Sorin Bolocan, Anca Ioana Nicolau, Joan Colom Comas, and Leontina Grigore Gurgu!

Phage microbiologist and co-founder of Phage Directory

Co-founderPostdoctoral Researcher

Iredell Lab, Phage Directory, The Westmead Institute for Medical Research, Sydney, Australia, Phage Australia

Email [email protected]

Twitter @JessicaSacher

Website https://phage.ca

Skills

Phage characterization, Phage-host interactions, Phage Therapy, Molecular Biology

How to Cite

To cite this, please use:

Sacher, J. (2022). C&T Round Up for June 2022! Capsid & Tail, 182. https://phage.directory/capsid/round-up-june-2022

BibTeX citation:

@article{Sacher2022C,

author = {Sacher, Jessica},
journal = {Capsid & Tail},
number = {182},
year = {2022},
publisher = {Phage Directory},
title = {C&{T} {Round} {Up} for {June} 2022!},

}

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All diagrams and text in this issue of Capsid & Tail is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY 4.0, unless otherwise noted.

For every issue of Capsid & Tail, we are committed to getting our facts straight, but we’re not experts in the information we’re bringing to you. If you feel that we’ve missed an important viewpoint, or if you have something to add, please reach out to us by emailing [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you, and we’d be happy to revisit topics we’ve covered (ideally with added information and viewpoints from community members like you!).

Lastly, please reach out if you’re interested in writing for us, or have suggestions for future issues!

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