C&T Round Up for November 2021

Issue 155 | December 3, 2021

7 min read

This week, we highlight the feature articles we published in November! Learn about optimizing the route for phage delivery, single use bioreactor technologies vs. traditional solutions, and phage therapy to combat a shell infection in a sea turtle!

What’s New

JPIAMR (Joint Programming Initiative on Antimicrobial Resistance) has awarded funding to multiple new phage-related projects in the One Health space! Funded phage projects include:

Use of phage applications to combat MRSA at the sow-piglet interface to reduce exposure of staff and contamination of the environment (PHAGE-EX);
Phage treatment and wetland technology as intervention strategy to prevent dissemination of antibiotic resistance in surface waters (PhageLand);
Phage therapy to reduce AMR Enterobacteria spread from a One Health perspective (Phage-Stop-AMR)!

Congratulations to all the awardees!

Royal DSM, a Dutch nutrition, health and bioscience company, has released a one-hour phage testing kit

Viral egress via secretin pores in the bacterial host cell membrane reduces cell damage

Phage-encoded sigma factors alter bacterial dormancy

New ecological and genetic insights from studying viral communities of hot spring phototrophic microbial mats

Latest Jobs

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Two PhD positions on environmental and human viromes, and phage at Flinders University, South Australia

Lab Director to help with all aspects of phage therapy science at TAILOR Labs and Baylor College of Medicine, Texas

Research Specialist to isolate and characterise Actinobacteriophages at The University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Phage Process Engineer at Adaptive Phage Therapeutics, Marylands

PhD position investigating prokaryotic defence and phage anti-defence systems at the University of Southampton

Postdoctoral position to work on bacterial immune response to phage at Washington University, St. Louis

PhD project on phages as precision medicine in the ageing gut at the Quadram Institute Biosciences, Norwich

Research Specialist to characterize novel phages and viral adaptation at the University of Idaho, Moscow

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!

Join us next week for the last PHAVES event of the year (#25!). There will be phages AND puppies!

Dr. Stephanie Lynch of La Trobe University will share her recently completed PhD research on phage therapy for treating Staphylococcus pseudintermedius infections in canines!

When: Tues, Dec 7 at 4PM EST // 8AM Dec 8 AEDT (Sydney, Australia).

phageSuisse is hosting a webinar on December 7th on “Evaluation of phage therapy for the treatment of Staphylococcus aureus endovascular infections” by Jonathan Save PhD Student – University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Register here.

Many of us are excited for the upcoming Viruses of Microbes (VoM) conference finally taking place summer 2022 in Portugal (after being rescheduled from 2020). In collaboration, the International Society for Viruses of Microorganisms (ISVM), Phage Directory, and the organizers of VoM 2022 are excited to announce Season 2 of iVoM, a series of online lectures from prominent researchers studying viruses of microbes. Seven sessions will run from December 2021 to May 2022, in the lead-up to the exciting in-person version of VoM, July 2022.

The first iVoM2 event will be Dec. 8th at 12:00 PM (noon) CET, under the theme "Control on Viral Action: regulation of viral activity by other viruses and mobile genetic elements".

It will feature talks by:

Dr. Aude Bernheim, INSERM, France: “Systematic and quantitative view of the antiviral arsenal of prokaryotes”
Prof. Martin Polz, Univ. of Vienna, Austria: “The dynamics of bacterial innate defenses against phage”
Dr. Matthias Fischer, MPI for Medical Research, Germany: “The sleeper within - how endogenous virophages may defend protists against giant viruses”

Chair:

Prof. Corina Brussaard (Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, Netherlands)
Dr. Alex Petrovic Fabijan (Westmead Institue for Medical Research and University of Sydney, Australia)

The rest of iVoM Season 2 will take place in 2022 and consist of six additional sessions (#2-7) on the topics of:

Raiders of the third domain
Phage application in the One Health approach
Endless virus diversity most beautiful
Environmental impact of virus-host interactions
Models for viral action
Personalised phage therapy

Phage Directory’s new structured peer feedback platform, Instill Science, is now live, and the first few requests have been posted and replied to!

Can you help your fellow phage researchers by providing a second set of eyes on their work? If so, check out the active requests. Currently, Marwan M. Saleh, Bharat Jhunjhunwala, Steve Abedon, Stephen Amankwah, Noutin Fernand Michodigni and Jan Zheng are looking for feedback or collaborators, ranging from feedback on a study on phage therapy and a phage book chapter, to help with experiments and tools, to those willing to have a conversation about phage databases.

Become an Instill member!

What does feedback look like? Spend 30 mins reading through and giving your first impressions and overarching thoughts on any given piece of work. Your contributions will be tracked and recognized, and you’ll be helping fellow researchers by sharing your expertise.

Thanks so much to those who have already responded to these requests and are working to provide feedback already: Betty Kutter, Urmi Bajpai, Tobi Nagel, Daniel Schwartz, Katharine Muscat, and Atif Khan! You are all amazing and we are so grateful for your support!

Submit your own request for help!

Thank you to everyone that joined us for our November PHAVES, which was a seminar by Prof. Julianne Grose (phage researcher) and Dr. Whitney Greene, DVM (veterinarian) talking about phage therapy for a sea turtle — watch the recording here! If you miss any of the PHAVES events you can always watch the recordings on the Phage Directory YouTube.

C&T Round Up for November 2021

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 four feature articles we published in November. 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!

Optimising the route for phage delivery, a guest blog post by Lizzie Richardson
The Modern Laboratory: Single use bioreactor technologies vs. traditional solutions, a guest blog post by Adam Ostrowski
Flipping the turtle back on its flippers: Phage therapy to combat a shell infection in a sea turtle, a ‘behind the paper’ article by Stephanie Lynch, which includes an interview with Whitney Greene

C&T Throwback!

There’s lots of great phage stuff in the C&T archive! Check out “Looking back on iVoM: Six webinars covering all aspects of viruses of microbes”, by Ivone Martins and Luís Melo, co-organizers of iVoM Season #1. (Catch yourself up just in time for iVoM Season #2, which starts next week!)

Many thanks to Atif Khan for finding and summarizing this week’s phage news, jobs and community posts, and to Lizzie Richardson and Stephanie Lynch for help editing!

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. (2021). C&T Round Up for November 2021. Capsid & Tail, (155). Retrieved from https://phage.directory/capsid/round-up-nov-2021

BibTeX citation:

@article{round-up-nov-20212021,

journal = {Capsid & Tail},
number = {155},
publisher = {Phage Directory},
title = {C&T Round Up for November 2021},
url = {https://phage.directory/capsid/round-up-nov-2021},
author = {Sacher, Jessica},
date = {2021-12-03},
year = {2021},
month = {12},
day = {3},

}

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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!).

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