Community post

Joshua Borin (University of California San Diego) and colleagues published a new paper in PNAS showing that coevolutionary phage training leads to greater bacterial suppression and delays the evolution of phage resistance. For example, they found that a phage trained for 28 days suppressed bacteria ∼1,000-fold for 3-8x longer than its untrained ancestor. Interestingly, one way that this phage improved was by recombining with a defunct prophage gene in the host genome, which doubled its fitness.