Issue 111
C&T Round Up for January 2021
This week, we're highlighting the four feature articles we published in January: Phage Directory's 2021 outlook, a guest blog post, an interview, and a first look at our State of Phage survey results! Enjoy!
Sponsor
Sponsor
This issue was sponsored by Kisaco Research for Phage Futures 2021.
Community digest1alert5updates2jobs3posts
Phage alert
Add your voice to the State of Phage 2020 Survey!
In celebration of our 100th issue of Capsid & Tail, we launched a survey called State of Phage 2020! We created this survey to help us all better understand the phage research community globally, including what kind of phages people are collecting, what methods they're using, and more. If you work with phages, please fill it out! We'll compile and share the results in Capsid & Tail in 2021, and repeat the survey annually so we can all follow and share our community's exciting growth over time.
SURVEY CLOSES IN 24 HOURS
Thanks so much to the 134 labs who've completed the survey, and to those who have shared it!! Today is the last day the survey will be open, so if you've started but haven't finished (58 of you — your browser should have saved your progress!) or you want to take it from the beginning, please fill it out today!
We'd love if you continued sharing it with friends! https://survey.phage.directory/
Updates
Armata Pharmaceuticals announced a $20 Million investment to support advancement of its clinical phage development programs. Armata aims to complete a phage clinical trial (Phase 1b/2a, P. aeruginosa) and initiate three more in 2021-2022.
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 phages were isolated, including the first known phage to infect bacterial clade SAR11.
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 Galleria mellonella larvae (an in vivo model) and showed that the cocktail improved larvae survival by 88-100%.
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 of antibody and T cell-mediated immune response when they tested the construct on rabbit and mouse models. Beyond SARS-CoV-2, this platform has the potential to generate cost-effective and efficient vaccine candidates against any future pathogen.
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 South India. This study includes full genomic characterization of the phage plus combinatorial studies with antibiotics. — Thanks Nitasha for the submission!
Jobs
Armata Pharmaceuticals (Marina del Rey, California) is hiring an Associate Scientist/Scientist Phage & Bacterial Genetics, Engineering & Synthetic Biology to evaluate existing engineering methods and devise new ones to build improved phages for clinical development.
Phage biotech company Proteon Pharma (Warsaw, Poland) is hiring a business analyst.
Community board
PHAVES #12 will be a seminar with Dr. Betty Kutter of the Evergreen State College on Tues, Feb 9 at 8AM Pacific Time / 11AM Eastern Time. Title: Phages as a teaching tool, and stories from 60 years of phage. Small group networking to follow! Register here!
Carmen (@PhageAnt on Twitter) would like to hear from you! Do you have any recommendations for any conferences/talks that are heavily involved in viral metagenomics? Reply to the Twitter post if you have any suggestions!
My name is Farhad Afrasiabi. Ph.D. student in the Department of Microbiology at Hamadan University of Medical Sciences, IRAN. I am interested in working on phage. I am currently working on a joint project to do my doctoral thesis on phage. Of course, I've also ready to work on any project that you want to do. Please email me at afrasiabifarhad@gmail.com to discuss opportunities.
In this month's Capsid & Tail Monthly Round Up issue, we're highlighting the four feature articles we published in January. 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!
- 2021: Empowering the phage community, an insight into Phage Directory's 2021 outlook from co-founders Jessica Sacher and Jan Zheng
- A fresh look at last century’s phages, a guest article by Ayuen Lual and Juandem Agendia of NCTC.
- Enough phage for a farm: How Proteon Pharmaceuticals manufactures phages for livestock farming, an interview with Arkadiusz Wojtasik, Production Director at Proteon Pharmaceuticals, by Jessica Sacher
- State of Phage #1: A wide diversity of backgrounds & phage experience, a first look at the State of Phage 2020 survey results by Jessica Sacher and Jan Zheng.
C&T Throwback!
There's lots of great phage stuff in the C&T archive! Remember this article on A phage biologist’s path from academia to industry and back — an interview with Dr. Ben Burrowes?
Thanks to Stephanie Lynch and Atif Khan for their work writing summaries for the What's New section this week!
Stephanie Lynch, PhD
Stephanie is a postdoctoral researcher for the Iredell Group at Westmead Institute for Medical Research, NSW. Her project focuses on phage therapy for compassionate human cases (as part of Phage Australia), with a particular interest in Staphylococcal phages. In 2021, Stephanie completed her thesis titled ‘Exploring phage therapy for Staphylococcus pseudintermedius infections in canines'. Steph is always willing to chat about phage research and would like to connect with phage biotech companies.