Issue 165
C&T Round Up for February!
This week, we highlight the features we published in Feb — learn about digital phagograms, phageSuisse and the recently held Bacteriophage Therapy Summit!
Community digest5updates2jobs2posts
Updates
Phage therapy protocol approved: Phage Australia, a network of phage researchers and clinicians, are excited to announce the approval of the STAMP phage therapy protocol. which regulates the process of phage therapy rather than a phage product specifically.
Paper: Phage banks as potential tools to rapidly and cost-effectively manage antimicrobial resistance in the developing world
Preprint: A five-fold expansion of the global RNA virome reveals multiple new clades of RNA bacteriophages
Paper: Rapid assessment of phage therapeutic suitability using an ensemble machine learning approach
Paper: Systematic analysis of putative phage‑phage interactions on minimum‑sized phage cocktails
Jobs
Research Fellow: Work with a team of researchers to work on phage genome engineering, phage display, and directed evolution.
Bioinformatics and genome engineering positions: Join CSIRO to deliever bioinformatic innovations to combat AMR and design novel drugs and vaccines.
Community board
𝔸𝕕𝕣𝕚𝕒𝕟𝕒 ℂ𝕒𝕣𝕠𝕝𝕚𝕟𝕒 on Twitter: "I'm discussing Phage Phriday: Phages in Italy with @MotherOfPhage, @PaulPirnay, and Phage Club. Phorza Italia! See you tomorrow, Feb 25 at 11:00 AM PST in @clubhouse. Join us!"
Want an update on the current state of phage therapy in Australia? Get your bite-sized fix with #PhageBites! The Australian Society for Microbiology’s Bacteriophage SIG online symposium is March 1st – register here to hear from PhD/ECR speakers @_reneenicole, @RRocapinilla, @KatharineMuscat & @NandoGordillo. Plus a phage expert panel @Iredell_Lab, @JeremyJBarr & Dr. Sandra Morales!
In this month's Capsid & Tail Monthly Round Up issue, we're highlighting the three feature articles we published in February. 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!
- All good things come in fours: a sneak peek at the 4th annual Bacteriophage Therapy Summit, a look at the Bacteriophage Therapy Summit by Jessica Neubauer
- Digital phagograms: how can we predict phage infectivity?, a guest post by Dimi Boeckaerts
- phageSuisse: toward phage therapy in Switzerland, a recap of four recent phageSuisse webinars by Vera Neumeier
C&T Throwback!
There's lots of great phage stuff in the C&T archive! Check out this article on Phage therapy in the human gut by Sabrina Green!
Thanks so much to Steph Lynch for finding and summarizing updates, jobs and community posts 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!