Issue 235
Evergreen 2023 Schedule & Lineup!
Hi everyone! Evergreen is in TWO DAYS! We’re doing a lot of work preparing for the 25th Evergreen Phage Meeting, and it’s been a whirlwind. There’s a lot we’ve done, and there’s a lot left to do for before, during, and after the meeting. Here’s what to look forward to next week! Also, because both Jessica and I are staffing Evergreen, Capsid & Tail will be on a short hiatus until Evergreen’s wrapped up (and we’ve recovered!).
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The Evergreen International Phage Meeting is happening Aug 6-11, 2023, live in Olympia, Washington, USA! This is an in-person meeting, better known as Phage Camp! Come present your phage work, climb mountains with other phage scientists, play phage-related board games, see a special showing of the Salt in My Soul documentary, and much more! This is the 50th anniversary meeting, hosted by Betty Kutter, Queen of Phage.
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Updates
Melissa Su Juan Chee (National University of Singapore) and colleagues have uncovered a new process of gene transfer in Staphylococcus aureus mediated by staphylococcal pathogenicity islands (SaPIs) that can mobilize and transfer two pathogenicity islands in a single particle, highlighting previously unknown roles of pathogenicity islands in bacterial virulence.
Susanne Meile, Jiemin Du (ETH Zurich) and colleagues have published a new paper on engineered reporter phages for detection of Escherichia coli, Enterococcus, and Klebsiella in urine.
A preprint by Natalia Quinones-Olvera and colleagues reports that diverse and abundant viruses exploit conjugative plasmids.
Zimbabwean biomedical researcher Rutendo Kahari was featured in Forbes. She aims to use phages to fight tuberculosis and other infectious diseases, with a focus on addressing health equity across Africa.
Le Temps newspaper in Switzerland featured phage therapy for antimicrobial resistance on its front page.
Jobs
Postdoctoral Appointee – Synthetic Bacteriophages Targeting Bacterial Pathogens: Sandia National Laboratories is hiring a postdoc to further develop and implement a new technology platform ("Phage Factory") that enables on-demand production of virulent phages that specifically and efficiently target bacteria of interest. The project will involve phage and bacterial genome engineering and bioinformatic approaches.
The Integrated Viromics Lab at the University of Calgary, Canada is hiring a Lab Technician / Manager to support the establishment of a gut phage culture collection. You will perform a range of functions, from everyday management of laboratory resources to organizing and maintaining media, plates, and bacterial and phage stocks.
The Emiola lab at the NIH (Bethesda, USA) is hiring a postdoc interested in understanding how microbes interact in their ecosystem, contribute to diseases, and how they suppress the growth of competitors through the secretion of antimicrobials.
North Carolina State University (Raleigh, USA) is hiring a Temporary Research Technician to characterize phage for soft rotting bacteria and Xanthomonas pathogens of peach and pepper.
KU Leuven, Belgium is hiring a PhD researcher for synergistic biocontrol technologies in strawberry pest management.
University of Pittsburgh is hiring a Laboratory Research Technician to study phage-related mechanisms.
Baylor College of Medicine (Houston, TX) is hiring a Research Technician II to join a vibrant group of Molecular Biologists and Microbiologists charged with understanding the molecular basis of mutation and cell evolution.
The Medical Research Institute of the Hospital La Fe in Spain is hiring a laboratory technician for a project related to new strategies for healthcare associated infections.
Adaptive Phage Therapeutics is hiring a Manufacturing Associate II to contribute to the development of phage-based therapeutics.
King's College London, UK is hiring a Research Associate in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology to develop pipelines, analyse and characterise multi-omics data to identify antimicrobial resistance, phage and plasmids in microbiome samples from chronic liver disease patients.
Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (NTU, Singapore) is hiring a Research Associate to evaluate the potency and pharmacokinetics of therapeutic phages in animal models of bacterial infections.
Community board
BBC StoryWorks is releasing a documentary titled "Race Against Resistance: The Life And Death Struggle To Save Antibiotics", which focuses on the global race against antimicrobial resistance. The documentary features patients, doctors, scientists, and experts working to ensure we have the medicines we need now and in the future.
We’ve spent the last couple of months planning, building, and putting together the Evergreen schedule for the scientific talks, posters, and other events. Here’s a preview of what’s to come!
Evergreen Science Schedule
First of all, here’s the full schedule: https://evergreen.phage.directory/schedule
For the Scientific portion, we have finalized the talk schedule, and have 83 scientific talks, spread across 8 sessions, over four days. We’ll cover categories like Phage Therapy, Phage Defense, Ecology and Informatics, and Molecular Phage Biology, and will hear from a a variety of speakers from around the world. Additionally, we’re encouraging all speakers to present their talk as posters for Q&A time and the opportunity for deeper discussions.
In total, we have 140 submitted abstracts, with a total of 656 coauthors. We’ll have informal poster room sessions across many days, with two formal Poster Session Mixers on Wednesday and Thursday.
We’re also striving to record all talks, and are encouraging speakers and presenters to upload Posters and “Flash Talks” of their talks so that everyone can view
For Workshops: For the 25th Evergreen Phage Meeting, we have five workshops lined up. On Sunday, we’ll be learning about Metagenomics with Evelien Adriaenssens from Quadram Institute, Sequence Analysis with Justin Clark from TAILOR, Genome Annotation with BV-BRC (formerly PATRIC) with Ramy Aziz and Rebecca Wattam, and finally a special round table for Phage Biobanking Guidelines and Standards with Tobi Nagel from Phages for Global Health and Fran Hodges from the UK KTN.
Salt in My Soul Screening Movie Screening & Panel
On Monday evening, we’ll be screening Salt in My Soul, a documentary about Mallory’s life with cystic fibrosis, and her race to get phages in time to treat her Burkholderia infection. We’ll screen this movie in downtown Olympia at the Capitol Theater, followed by a panel Diane Shader Smith (Mallory’s mother), Martha Clokie, Tom Patterson, and Steffanie Strathdee. After the movie, we’ll have an informal mixer at Nicole’s Bar.
Past, Present and Future of Betty Kutter’s Legacy
This year, we’re doing a special event to commemorate Evergreen Phage history and Betty Kutter’s legacy. We’ll hear stories from a panel of speakers from Betty’s past and present, including Martha Clokie, Bob Blasdel, Patrick Paddison, Steffanie Strathdee, Randy Fish, Ramy Aziz, Gina Suh, Steve Abedon.
We’ll also set up a gallery of photos and past work from Betty’s life in the hallway. Here are a few items we’ve found from the archive.
Evergreen Fun
TAILOR is doing a scavenger phage hunt in various locations around Evergreen. They’ll have a special machine for processing environmental samples (!). They’ll be setting up something creative and cool — we can’t wait to see it!
On Thursday, we’re celebrating Betty turning 84 with plenty of cake. Our t-shirts will also be arriving that day.
Our t-shirts are coming in next Thursday, and will be available for purchase!
On Friday, we’ll still be doing the customary hike to Mt. Rainier! We’ll have a spread of lunch available, a bus from the mountain straight to SeaTac airport, and tons of phage conversations.
Evergreen Online Availability
Since many couldn’t make it out to Olympia for various reasons, like visas not processing soon enough, or lack of funding, we’re striving to put as much of Evergreen online as possible.
We’re dealing with some AV staffing issues at Evergreen State, but we’re striving to record as many talks and workshops as we can. We’re also encouraging every speaker to upload their posters and a short Youtube video of their poster as well. Hopefully we’ll also make Youtube Live Streaming available!
And finally, we’ll make all the online resources, from abstracts to videos and posters free for anyone who registers an Evergreen account.
Sign up for an online account here: https://evergreen.phage.directory
Future Plans of Evergreen
It’s not clear what the future Evergreen Phage Meeting and Phagebiotics looks like yet, but this is most likely the last time Evergreen Phage Meeting is at Evergreen State College.
We’re still digging a up lot of resources from the past, and it would be great to create an online gallery for all the past videos and artifacts we’ve collected over the years, to commemorate the history of Evergreen Phage Meeting (and the history of phage research!).
If you have any ideas and suggestions, please email Ria (who leads the Phagebiotics board) at tescphage@gmail.com.
The future of Evergreen is uncertain, but bright!
Jan Zheng, MHCI
I'm Jan, the other half of Phage Directory, and co-write Capsid & Tail.
Previously, I did data work at Phage Australia / Westmead Institute, where I built the biobank databases, data systems, and bioinformatics workflows for the clinical trial
I have a background in computer science and human-computer interaction, and I'm currently full-time at building the agentic layer for science at Nvidia.