Capsid & Tail
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- Q&A: Favorite phage production equipmentThis week we're trying something new — let's call it Phage Community Q&A! You send us your questions, we send you off-the-cuff answers. This week, Jess shares her favorite phage-making equipment in response to a researcher who's setting up…

- How to get successful outcomes with phage therapy"When I first treated, we had no idea how much to give, how often to give... we weren't aware of what the concentration of phage should be." IPATH's Dr. Saima Aslam shares how eight years of treating patients has taught her team to achieve…

- Our Phage Picks for Aug 2025It’s Phage Picks time! This week, we highlight some new mind-expanding papers — one showing how phage killing might train the immune system like vaccines, one unpacking how temperate phages rewrite bacterial flagella with RNA-guided tools,…

- C&T Round Up for July 2025!This month, we explored how Canada's first successful prosthetic joint infection phage therapy case is leading up to a full clinical trial; plus Jessica wrote a guide/manifesto(?) about why you should sequence (and re-sequence) your phages.

- You should sequence your phagesWhen's the last time you sequenced the phages in your lab? Have you ever, or are you relying on what someone said they were? You might be like 12/13 phage labs and have secret mixtures masquerading as pure phages. You should sequence your…

- Inside Canada's first prosthetic joint phage treatment"It still doesn't happen overnight — the paperwork itself, I aged like 20 years." Dr. Marisa Azad shares the real timeline and logistics behind Canada's first bone infection phage therapy case, plus why her N-of-1 approach creates a…

- C&T Round Up for June 2025!This month, Jess went viral with a post about How to Read Papers, we picked some great bread and butter papers, and Jess got to chat with Cytophage about navigating the Canadian regulatory phage maze.

- How to read papersThis week we're diving into something we're pretty sure every researcher grapples with: how to read papers without your brain melting! Jess posted about this on LinkedIn and it blew up — tons of researchers shared their own…

- Our Phage Picks for June 2025It's Phage Picks time! This week Jess picks another 'bread-and-butter' phage lab paper about how to keep your phages stable (genetically and physically) over the decades, and Jan surfaces a killer overview of all the ways phage + AI is…

- How to navigate regulatory limbo: a Canadian phage therapy CEO's playbook"There's 145 components of the regulatory requirements that I don't fit in. So how do I get past that? And governments right now say, I don't know."

- C&T Round Up for May 2025!For this month, we feature a guest post about pipolin use in PCR, two podcasts from Jess, and another lab hacks episode from Jan.

- Why aren't we using primerless PCR for microbial discovery?What are pipolins, and how can they help us discover more microbes? Aaryan Harshith's newest post dives into primer-independent polymerases, and how they can help us break through biases of our current microbe-mapping methods.

- Finding papers at scaleAmong the millions of papers published each year, how can you make sure you never touch another irrelevant paper?

- Why can't more patients access phage therapy?"This feels just like the early days of the HIV crisis. People are dying, you're not hearing about it. We need a group like ACT UP to bring this to the public. We're not going to get phage therapy until people start demanding we have it."

- Finally, phase 2 phage therapy data! Inside BiomX's successful trial with CEO Jonathan Solomon"We put a dent in the theory that phage therapy doesn't work. Maybe it does work. Maybe it's worth taking a risk." This week we talk to Jonathan Solomon, CEO of BiomX, about their successful phase 2 clinical trial for diabetic foot…

- C&T Round Up for April 2025!Another round up! This month, we feature a new Lab Hacks format from Jess, one of our most controversial Capsid posts on AI use in science, and a Phage Picks of some of Jessica's nearest and dearest protocols (she uses these all the time —…

- Our Phage Picks for April 2025It's Phage Picks time! This week's theme is bread and butter — two picks from Jess about methods papers that should be staples of any phage lab: her favourite phage-making paper, and an (aspirational) phage quantification paper she really…

- Does every scientist need an AI co-scientist?"It was right in front of us the whole time." Imperial College London professors José Penadés & Tiago Costa challenged Google's new 'AI co-scientist' with a phage PICI question they'd just solved after years of work. Given their unpublished…

- Tips from the lab: Rapid lab hacksNew format alert! Here's 5 rapidfire, off-the-cuff tips from the lab — from how to tweak plaque size to purifying filamentous phages to preventing phage cross-contamination. These first 5 are written by Jessica but we hope to crowdsource…

- C&T Round Up for March 2025!Roundup time! This month, we heard from Aaryan's experience as an undergrad researcher at Paul Bollyky's lab. We picked papers across topics like T4-AAV viral vectors, cell-free synthesis of phages, and taxMyPhage, a new tool for…
