Thank you to everyone who participated in our very first #WorldPhageWeek #scicomm challenge! Overall we had just over 70 individual phage researchers participate, and it was great seeing all the phage posts on Twitter! Thank you again to Dr. Ellie Jameson who kindly agreed to create a custom phage art piece for the winner! We spun a wheel to decide the winner, and the winner is… Karen Adler!!! Congratulations Karen!

For PHAVES #24 next week, veterinarian Dr. Whitney Greene & phage researcher Prof. Julianne Grose will give a talk entitled ‘Phage Researcher & Veterinarian Perspective: Phage therapy to combat a shell infection in a sea turtle’ on November 10 at 3 PM EST! Register here! (If you’re already signed up for the PHAVES series, no need to register again; we’ll send you the link closer to the date).

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, 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!

Conventional homology-based comparative genomic analyses can only do so much in extracting information from databases. We used phages to test our comparative genomics tool (CALANGO) that considers annotation terms besides sequence data. By focusing on E. coli genomes and prophages, we found that pathogenic E. coli have more prophages than non-pathogenic ones, and genes of viral origin are associated to prophages. Genes annotated as virulence factors are also associated to prophage density, but several are not coded by the prophages themselves. We also found genes negatively associated to prophage presence.

Read our preprint here and try the CALANGO package on your organisms of choice. We are looking forward for your findings, feedback and criticism! I (@Gabriel_MFA) am only a non-coding contributor, so please look for the masterminds behind the project for more info: @_fcampelo and @chicao_lobo.

Check out the phage community question on Twitter by Dr. Sabrina Green (@MotherOfPhage). “This is a long shot maybe but does anyone have any Pseudomonas #phages that use the type IV pilus as a receptor? This is not for me but a collaborator. Thanks phage community!”. If you can help, reply to Sabrina’s Twitter thread.

Head to YouTube and check out Bacteriophage in Arabic, a channel with a series of seminars and explanation videos about phage!