Issue 173
C&T Round Up for April 2022!
This week, we highlight the features we published in April! Catch up on what happened at the last Phage Futures Europe, and learn how to organize your phage biobank data!
Sponsor
Sponsor
This year is the 130th anniversary of the birth year of George Eliava, who founded the Eliava Research Institute in Tbilisi, Georgia.
PHAGE Journal will celebrate this event with a focused issue of phage therapy then and now!
If you would like to include your phage therapy work in this June Issue, please submit ASAP to be considered!
Community digest5updates7jobs5posts
Updates
Paper: Two defense systems eliminate plasmids from seventh pandemic Vibrio cholerae
Blog: Antibiotic-resistant acne could be treated by phage therapy
Pre-print: MetaPhage: an automated pipeline for analyzing, annotating, and classifying bacteriophages in metagenomics sequencing data
Paper: Modelling of filamentous phage-induced antibiotic tolerance of Pseudomonas aeruginosa
Paper: The chronic wound phageome: phage diversity and associations with wounds and healing outcomes
Jobs
Join BioNTech as Director, Discovery to lead the development of the early endolysin pipeline! In this position you can advance your career of leadership in science, push the boundaries of synthetic biology and work on the next frontier of antimicrobial therapy.
Scientist, Phage Microbiology: Janssen Research & Development, LLC, a member of the Johnson and Johnson family of companies is recruiting for a Scientist, Phage Microbiology, Infectious Disease, to work in Spring House, PA. Please email your resume to mdas26@its.jnj.com
Research Scientist to join the phage therapy working group at the Institute for Modeling Collaboration and Innovation (IMCI) at the University of Idaho, to advance phage therapy using evolution.
Postdoctoral Fellow to carry out research and engagement activities surounding course-based undergraduate research experiences (e.g. SEA-PHAGES).
Research Assistant to join the Catalano lab to explore the capsid of phage lambda as a theranostic nanoparticle platform.
Postdoctoral Fellow to join the Novo Nordisk Foundation to study the interplay between a virus and its host, namely phages and bacteria.
Research scientist at University of Idaho: The person will join the Phage Therapy Working Group with its goal of advancing the principles of phage therapy using evolution. This position will play a central role in driving the team’s research by combining lab work (microbiology and DNA sequencing) with bioinformatics and quantitative analysis (genome assembly, mutation analysis, statistical inference).
Community board
iVoM Season 2, episode #7: Personalised phage therapy
Date: 3 pm CET, Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022 *Note: 9am Eastern Daylight Time
Register at https://ivom.phage.directory
Talks Therapeutic phage monitoring in children
- Dr. Ameneh Khatami, University of Sydney, Australia
Quality Control of Phage APIs for human therapeutic use
- Dr. Pieter-Jan Ceyssens, Sciensano, Belgium
...and meanwhile in the Israeli Phage Therapy Center (IPTC)
- Prof. Ronen Hazan, Institute of Biomedical and Oral Research (IBOR), Israel
Chairs
- Dr. Matthias Fischer , Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Heidelberg, Germany
- Prof. Corina Brussaard , Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, Netherlands
Phage Canada is hosting our 2022 (Virtual) Symposia, August 17-20th. Over three half-days, we will feature (I) Undergraduate Education & Research, (II) Graduate & Post Graduate Research, and (III) Career Opportunities in Phage Research. The emphasis is on showcasing the fantastic research being done by trainees in Canada.
Attendance is open to everyone, and is free - although capacity limits may require prioritizing those with Canadian research affiliations.
For more information, check out our website: https://event.fourwaves.com/phage2022
This registration is for the virtual portion of the 2022 Viromics Workshop held at OSU, May 11-13. On the first day (May 11), there will be a mini-symposium, consisting of four talks from our teaching staff. These will be broadcasted live via zoom. It is for this session only that this registration form is for. Closer to the date, we will send the zoom invite.
The Ibadan Bacteriophage Research Team (IBRT) is setting up a Twitter space event to discuss Undergraduate Phage Research in Africa via the team's Twitter handle.
Topic: Undergraduate Phage Research in Africa: Success stories and Challenges
Date: 06 May, 2022
Time: 6pm Nigerian time (5pm GMT)
Venue: Twitter Space @IbadanPhageTeam
UltraRare Bio on Twitter: "Our latest podcast episode is live! Learn about how a decentralized network of researchers and doctors find cures for drug-resistant infections w/ @phagedirectory founders @JessicaSacher and @yawnxyz"
In this month's Capsid & Tail Monthly Round Up issue, we're highlighting the two feature articles we published in April. Be sure to check them out if you missed them, and let us know if you have thoughts, comments or questions! Reach us anytime by email!
- Phage therapy, translated: where is the field at?, a report on key takeaways from the Phage Futures 2021 event by Sheetal Patpatia and Aël Hardy
- How to organize your biobank data, a blog post by Jan Zheng
C&T Throwback!
There's lots of great phage stuff in the C&T archive! Check out this article on How coevolutionary phage training improves phage efficacy by Joshua Borin!
Thanks so much to Atif Khan and Stephanie Lynch for collecting and summarizing links to share for this week!
Jessica Sacher, PhD
I'm a co-founder of Phage Directory and have a PhD in Microbiology from the University of Alberta (I studied Campylobacter phage biology). For Phage Directory, I help physicians find phages for their patients, and I'm always trying to find new ways to help the phage field grow (especially through connecting people and highlighting awesome stuff I see happening in the field).
I spent 2022-2024 as a postdoc in Jon Iredell's group at Westmead Institute for Medical Research in Sydney, Australia, helping get Phage Australia off the ground. I helped set up workflows for phage sourcing, biobanking, diagnostics, production, purification and QC of therapeutic phage batches, and helped build data collection systems to track everything we did. We treated more than a dozen patients in our first year, and I'm so proud of that!
As of 2024, I joined the Bollyky lab at Stanford University as a Staff Scientist, where I'm focused on phage engineering and delivery (to both microbial and human cells) and hydrogel-embedded phage cocktail development for wounds!