Hello phage phans,
We’re at the end of May, and it’s been good for us! We just came back from a stint in Austria, where we visited Alpendorf for a wedding! It’s a beautiful place, and they have a stunning (and the world’s largest) ice cave. It’s well-worth a visit.
We’re getting settled in SF as Jessica’s starting her new position (we’ll share more details soon!) and I’m working to build AI-tools for biology (I promise to write more in this area, too).
Despite our new responsibilities, we’re still going strong on Capsid & Tail! We had a lot of great articles lined up in May, including introducing our new podcast interview series!
We’re still looking for guest posts for the rest of the year — we’d love to hear more about your deep phage research — anywhere from bioinformatics to phage engineering and phage/host molecular interactions. Both Jess and I and our audience absolutely love to read in-depth, behind-the-paper articles of some of your coolest findings.
If you’re looking for your next post-doc — or applying for a post-doc! — writing about your research will help you find that perfect match.
No idea is too small or too large — email me with your ideas: [email protected]
This is what we covered in the month of May:
by Jeremy Barr and Jessica Sacher
In this article (and brand new podcast!!), Jessica and Jeremy have a nice chat about the upcoming Viruses of Microbes (VoM). The team has been planning it since 2019, and this is the first VoM held outside of Europe, in Cairns, Australia (Ed. note: Just like Eurovision!). Right next to the Great Barrier Reef, it’s a tropical conference with lots of wildlife (crocs and drop bears!). It’s also shaping up with a diverse mix of 470 submitted abstracts, a sci-comm workshop for early career researchers, rainforest-themed socials with drop bears, and even an ECR-focused split session! It’s going to be the coolest VoM, so if you’re on the fence… definitely go. It’s a trip of a lifetime.
by Jan Zheng & Jessica Sacher
In this month’s Phage Picks, Jess and I picked four recent but diverse phage papers, that caught our attention in some way.
The first paper by Lin reviews the expanding universe of noncanonical contractile injection systems (CIS) in bacteria, which resemble phage tail fibers and have potential applications in programmable protein delivery. The second paper by Lugagne et al. demonstrates a deep learning model predictive control system that can predict and manipulate gene expression in thousands of individual E. coli cells by optimizing light stimuli, opening up exciting possibilities for phage-bacteria interaction studies and phage therapy cocktail design. The third paper by Sollier et al. introduces Figeno, a new open-source tool for visualizing multi-region genomic data with long-read support. The fourth paper by Rebula et al. provides a detailed guide to using CIM monolithic chromatography for effective phage purification, with a new technique called PATfix for real-time monitoring of phage concentration and impurity removal.
We’ve heard from some of you that you really like this format — our stats also show way tons of readership for Phage Picks! Please write us to let us know how we can improve it (or if you just have nice things to say you can tell us how much you like it)! We’re super proud of this format and can’t wait to share more papers with you.
by Gareth (Gary) Trubl
In this announcement, Gary Trubl invites phage phans to attend the 2024 International Soil Virus Conference in Livermore, California from June 25-27. The conference will bring together soil virus researchers to foster collaboration, discuss cutting-edge research, and shape the trajectory of the field, and will feature a dynamic program of talks, discussions, poster presentations, and tours of National Lab facilities. The conference is limited to 60 in-person attendees (with virtual option available), and the objective is to explore soil viruses’ roles in a One Health framework, with emphasis on meta-omics characterization and connections to biogeochemistry, food web dynamics, and soil health.
by Gábor Apjok
In this article, Gábor Apjok discusses his experiences volunteering to help with our Phage Alerts cases, despite the regulatory challenges surrounding phage therapy in his home country of Hungary. When responding to our Phage Alerts, Gábor attempts to match target pathogens with existing phages from his collection or isolate new phages from wastewater samples. The phage isolation process Gábor follows involves multiple rounds of purification, sequencing, bioinformatic analysis, and efficacy testing through killing curves and synergy assessments. While Gábor notes that phage isolation can be completed quickly, he highlights the regulatory hurdles that remain around phage production and purification in accredited labs before clinical use. Gábor argues that despite some challenges, phage therapy is a promising but underutilized tool that could help combat antibiotic resistance if given more governmental awareness and support to develop appropriate regulatory frameworks.
C&T Throwback!
This month I’d like to highlight one of our first articles, when we first started Capsid & Tail when we were traveling through Spain. I think it was Valencia (?) where we came up with the idea and somewhere else in Europe where we built the entire workflow and wrote the first article. Back then, we visited the Belgian group at Queen Astrid Military Hospital, right when they were starting to do phage therapy via the Magistral Phage framework. Much has changed yet stayed the same!
