Issue 191
C&T Round Up for August 2022!
This week, we highlight the feature articles we published in August! Learn about phage+AI and how you can get involved, what happened at Phage Futures this year, how phage-making is going at Phage Australia, and meet Phage Directory's stellar brigade of volunteers!
Community digest1alert5updates8jobs3posts
Phage alert
Urgent need for Proteus mirabilis, Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Morganella morganii phages for a patient in Saudi Arabia
We are urgently seeking Proteus mirabilis, Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Morganella morganii phages for a patient in Saudi Arabia. This is a multi-pathogen infection and would be the first phage therapy case in Saudi Arabia.
Ways to help at this stage:
- By sending your phages for testing on the patient's strains
- By receiving one or more of the patient's strains and testing your phages
- By receiving the strain(s) and using it/them to search for new phages
- By offering to prepare phages supplied by others to clinical grade
- By helping spread the word about this request
- By providing us with names/email addresses of labs you think we should contact
Please email staff@phage.directory if you can help in any way, or if you would like further details/clarification.
Let’s make a difference, Phage Directory
Updates
News: The UK National Health Service (NHS) has hired its first clinical phage specialist! Read about the new role, accepted by Dr. Josh Jones, an infectious disease physician in Scotland who’s been treating patients with diabetic foot ulcer infections using phages prepared in Belgium by the Queen Astrid Military Hospital.
Paper: Editing of phage genomes—recombineering-assisted SpCas9 modification of model coliphages T7, T5, and T3.
Paper: Genome dynamics, codon usage patterns and influencing factors in Aeromonas hydrophila phages.
Paper: T-phage inspired piezoelectric microrobot.
Jobs
Postdoc: A two-year postdoctoral position is available on or after September 1, 2022 under the supervision of Dr. Paul Turner in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. Email: paul.turner@yale.edu
Researcher: at University of Bologna in Italy to develop and validate (bio)sensors for the identification of Leishmania infantum in biological samples.
Phd position: modelling phage-host dynamics in bioreactors at KU Leuven, Belgium.
Staff Research Associate at UC San Diego to assist in research into how lambda phage evolves.
Research support technician in Santander, Spain: Isolation of phages active against pathogens, synthesis and characterization of liposomes and solid-lipid nanoparticles, combination of phages with antibacterials.
Lab Manager at University of Pittsburgh to support research operations in a microbiology laboratory using bacteria and bacteriophages.
Industrial microbiologist at Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology in environmental applications of antimicrobial treatments to contribute to the development and validation of antimicrobial solutions using probiotics or phages.
Laboratory Manager at University of Chicago to decipher virulence and colonization strategies of important microbial pathogens and symbionts including bacteria and viruses (including phages).
Community board
Hi everyone, after being virtual in 2021, our 2022 "Viral EcoGenomics and Applications" (VEGA) meeting is back in-person Oct 6 – 7, in the beautiful and sunny (although sometimes a bit foggy) Bay Area! (specifically on the Berkeley Lab campus).
This will be a two-day meeting with talks and discussions about everything related to viruses of microbes, especially phages, of course everything 'omics (especially metagenomics and metatranscriptomics), but also genetic engineering, phage-base biotechs, and more!
Never miss another phage event or deadline — you can now subscribe to Phage Calendar! Thanks to Sayde Perry, one of our star Phage Directory volunteers, for setting it up!
Subscribe to the Google calendar here.
If you use iCal, add it to your calendar with this .ics file.
Currently we’re adding conferences and deadlines to register for phage-related events and beyond. If you have anything you’d like to add to the calendar, fill out this form — please include the name, date(s), URL and optional short description.
Dear ISVM Members,
We are happy to announce upcoming elections for the ISVM Executive Board:
- Candidates' applications: deadline September 9th, 2022
- Voting: September 16th-30th, 2022
- Results: October 10th-15th, 2022
- Transition period: October 16th, 2022 - January 15th, 2023
- Changing of the board: January 15th, 2023
We are now gathering the list of candidates to stand for election.
As an Officer, you can help shape the future of ISVM, and we hope that you will step forward and express your interest in one of the positions.
The positions that are opened in this round (2023/24) are:
- President-Elect in 2023/2024 (preparation for becoming the next president in 2025/2026)
- Vice-President (replacement of President in case of absence)
- Treasurer (financial management & overview of the society)
- Information Officer (reporting and communication)
- Assistant Secretary (social media, newsletter; replacement of Information Officer in case of absence)
- Industry Outreach (industry contacts & sponsorship)
- Website Administrator (maintenance & design)
- Membership Secretary (updating memberships and statistics)
The election is open to all ISVM members.
Please see http://www.isvm.org/about.html for more information on ISVM governance.
Please contact Rob Lavigne (rob.lavigne@kuleuven.be) or Zuzanna Drulis-Kawa (zuzanna.drulis-kawa@uwr.edu.pl) for additional information.
All candidates should complete the candidate registration form (members would have received it by email) and send to membership@ISVM.org BEFORE SEPTEMBER 9th 2022.
Voting will be announced with an email that includes a link to the poll.
Thanks for your continued support.
The ISVM Board
In this month's Capsid & Tail Monthly Round Up issue, we're highlighting the four feature articles we published in August. 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!
- We have the best volunteers!, a blog post by Jessica Sacher highlighting our awesome Phage Directory volunteers!
- Therapeutic phage-making: how my first batch measured up, a blog post on recent progress toward making therapeutic phages, by Jessica Sacher
- Looking back on Phage Futures Europe 2022 — Part 1, a blog post by Madhav Madurantakam Royam and Jessica Neubauer on what they learned from Phage Futures Europe in Amsterdam (part 1 of 2!)
- PhageAI and natural language processing for in silico characterization of the phage life cycle, a blog post by Marcin Lubocki and Piotr Tynecki of PhageAI
C&T Throwback!
There's lots of great phage stuff in the C&T archive! Check out this article on Overcoming barriers to phage commercialization: a conversation with leaders at Cytophage and BiomX by Kyle Jackson.
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!