Search

Martin Jahn and colleagues recently published an interesting paper on the lifestyle of phages of marine sponges by host prediction and correlative microscopy. They used a new correlative in situ imaging approach (‘PhageFISH-CLEM‘) to locali

Luis Camarillo-Guerrero (Wellcome Sanger Insititute) and colleagues published a paper on the prevalence of viral diversity in the human gut, along with a new Gut Phage Database (142,809 non-redundant gut phage genomes from 28,060 metagenome

Few have explored how phages affect bacteria associated with winemaking. Cécile Philippe (University of Bordeaux, France) and colleagues published a new paper in Frontiers in Microbiology on the characterization of the first virulent phages

Varun Rakeshbhai Bavda (IISER, India) and colleagues published a new article on the molecular properties of mycobacteriophage D29 Holin, with an emphasis on potential for holin engineering. They demonstrated crucial amino acid regions for h

Esther Shmidov (Bar-Ilan University, Israel) and colleagues published a new paper on a counter selection-based novel method of curing prophages in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. They validated their method with local PCR amplification and whole-ge

Shayla Hesse (National Cancer Institute, USA) and colleagues published a new paper showing that mutations in genes coding for cell surface structures impair adsorption of phages in multidrug-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae. They concluded t

Mabruka Salem (University of Helsinki) and colleagues published a new paper on the isolation and characterization of three broad host range Yersinia phages. Phages were characterized with TEM, growth curves, burst size assays, and genome si

A year ago on Twitter, Jeremy Barr (Monash University) shared a picture of several 40-year old phage stocks, and asked "what should we do with them?" People said 'check titre!' 'get WGS' and 'are they the same as the stock phages we've all

Phages are generally described as species-specific or even strain-specific, but how often do we really check? Daniel Cazares (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico) and colleagues pitted phages against a diverse collection of 600

Elhanan Tzipilevich (Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School) and colleagues published a new preprint showing that bacteria elicit a transient phage tolerance response subsequent to infection of their neighbors!

Sabrina Green (Baylor College of Medicine) and colleagues published a new paper in MBio showing that a novel phage uses its tail fiber to bind to certain mammalian gut glycans, which helps it better target its host in the gut by localizing

Athina Zampara (University of Copenhagen, Denmark) and colleagues published a new paper in Frontiers in Microbiology on developing innolysins (endolysins fused to phage receptor binding proteins) against Campylobacter jejuni using a novel p

Diana Pires (University of Minho, Portugal) and colleagues published a new Scientific Reports paper describing the design and assembly of synthetic Pseudomonas aeruginosa phages made by knocking out up to 48% of a phage's genes of unknown f

Holger Buchholz (University of Exeter, UK) and colleagues published a new paper in The ISME Journal showing a high-throughput method for isolating virus-host model systems for fastidious heterotrophic bacteria. Using this method, 117 new ph

Janet Nale (University of Leicester, UK) and colleagues published a new paper in Frontiers in Microbiology on how an optimized phage cocktail they developed can effectively control Salmonella. They administered the three-phage cocktail to G

Jingen Zhu (The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC) and colleagues published a new preprint describing the use of CRISPR-engineered phage T4 as a universal platform to produce vaccines against SARS-CoV-2. They found high levels

Nitasha Menon (Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham University, India) and colleagues published a new paper in mSphere on a phage they isolated from sewage that has activity against multidrug resistant clinical isolates of Pseudomonas aeruginosa in S

Carly Davis (University of Alberta, Canada) and colleagues published a new paper in Microorganisms showing that aztreonam lysine (an antibiotic) increases the activity of phages E79 and phiKZ against Pseudomonas aeruginosa PA01.

Amjad Khan (Western University, Canada) and colleagues published a paper in PLOS Computational Biology showing that evolution along the parasitism-mutualism continuum determines the genetic repertoire of prophages.

In light of the COVID crisis, there seems to be renewed interest in using phages to deliver genetic material in the body. Matthew Tridgett (University of Warwick) and colleagues published a new paper detailing their method for engineering b