We have the best volunteers!

Issue 187 | August 5, 2022
8 min read
Capsid and Tail

A collection of some of our Phage Directory volunteers, who found each other at the VoM Portugal event this July! Thanks to Rohit Kongari for organizing this and sharing the picture!

Our lovely phage community would not exist without the hard work of some incredible phage enthusiasts! This week, we’re recognizing a few of our Phage Directory volunteers for some great stuff they’ve done lately.

Sponsor

JAFRAL Sponsorship Logo

Need help with phage manufacturing, and looking for an outsourcing partner? JAFRAL manufactures phages to the highest quality and purity, and develops manufacturing processes and analytical methods for various phage types and phage applications.

JAFRAL is the world’s only CMO/CRO that focuses primarily on production of non-GMP and GMP phages. More info at https://www.jafral.com or [email protected]

JAFRAL is one of Phage Directory’s year-round Bronze sponsors. Thank you so much for your continued support of this community!

What’s New

Paper: Personalized bacteriophage therapy to treat pandrug-resistant spinal Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection. (Author Tristan Ferry tweets about how this case highlights the role of academic/public collaborations in personalized phage therapy).

Phage TherapyResearch paper

Paper: Bacteriophages evolve enhanced persistence to a mucosal surface. Twitter thread by author Jeremy Barr.

Phage in the gutResearch paper

Paper: Mucin induces CRISPR-Cas defense in an opportunistic pathogen.

CRISPRPhage defense systemsResearch paper

Paper: Comparison of bacterial suppression by phage cocktails, dual-receptor generalists, and coevolutionarily trained phages.

Co-evolutionPreprint

Paper: MDR pumps as crossroads of resistance: antibiotics and bacteriophages.

AMRPhage-antibiotic interactionsResearch paper

Latest Jobs

Fluorescent MicroscopyResearch AssistantSingle cell
Research Assistant at Institut Cochin, Paris to work on a project (24-month contract) entitled “Characterisation of bacteria survival strategies upon bacteriophage exposure at the single cell level” under the supervision of Dr. Anne Chevallereau and Dr. Arnaud Gutierrez. The applicant should hold a MSc degree. Strong skills in Microbiology are mandatory. Experience in fluorescent microscopy or in phage biology will be appreciated. Contact us: [email protected], [email protected]
Functional genomicsMicrobiomePost Doc
Postdoc at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to examine multikingdom relationships in environmental microbiomes, with a particular focus on phage/bacteria interactions.
Phage in agricultureResearch Associate
Research Associate at the Department of Genetics and Genome Biology, University of Leicester. This post is funded by an industry award to isolate bacteriophages against Moraxella bovis strains associated with face flies and to carry out proof of principle data to identify and formulate phages.
Experimental OfficerStructural Biology
Experimental Officer at the University of Leicester Cryo-EM Facility. There will be opportunities to collaborate internally on exciting structural biology projects ranging from transcriptional regulation to phage biology.
Pathogenicity islandsPostgrad
Postgraduate researcher at University of Glasgow to study host pathogen interactions in Pneumococcal infection. Areas of interest include bacteriophage and pathogenicity island genetics.
Phage engineeringResearch Fellow
Research Fellowship at the Center of Biological Engineering at the University of Minho in Portugal to work within the scope of the R&D project, PhageShaper — a high throughput platform to engineer P. aeruginosa phages for infectious disease control.
Post Doc
Postdoc on microbial bioinformatics in the Jiang lab at the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, USA.

Community Board

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

Is there any interest in anyone at looking at the gut microbiome of a very small arachnida to ID bacteria and associated phages? Please contact B. Bloetscher at [email protected].

Seeking collaborator

Register to attend The Phage Canada Virtual Symposia 2022! This virtual event will be held August 17th - 19th and aims to promote the exchange of ideas within the phage field, provide a forum for students and postdocs to present their research and foster interactions between phage researchers. Deadline to register is Aug 13.

Virtual Event

We have the best volunteers!

Profile Image
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
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.

Did you know that Capsid & Tail (and many other aspects of our phage community) runs on the hard work of awesome, phage-enthusiastic volunteers across 9 time zones? This week I want to highlight some of the people who make our beloved community run, and some of the work they’ve done lately.

Phage companies or labs, if you’re ever looking for upbeat, self-motivated, reliable team players who also happen to work with phages, you cannot go wrong with any of these star individuals! Feel free to email me anytime and I’ll gladly tell you why.

There are many more volunteers who’ve helped us grow this community to what it is! A thousand thanks also to:

A giant THANK YOU to all of you!!

Volunteer with us! (Even if you’re super busy)

Busy scientists, you are welcome! I like to say that the great thing about volunteering with us is that you can pop in and out as your schedule permits. You can try your hand at science communication and community building, or do something small to strengthen or grow the phage community, even if you only have a little spare time or a volatile schedule.

For example, we’ve had volunteers help out for a season (or even for just one project), then move back out to focus on their lab work for half a year or even a year, then reappear and take on a project when they have time. We love this! We add volunteers to a special slack channel where they can see new projects as they come in, and choose to take something on when they can.

If you think there’s something you’d like to do to help grow the phage community, please email me and let me know what sparks your interest!

Capsid & Tail

Follow Capsid & Tail, the periodical that reports the latest news from the phage therapy and research community.

We send Phage Alerts to the community when doctors require phages to treat their patient’s infections. If you need phages, please email us.

Sign up for Phage Alerts

In collaboration with

Mary Ann Liebert PHAGE

Supported by

Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust

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