C&T Round Up for July 2020

Elizabeth Svoboda wrote a Nature Outlook article diving into the current state of phage therapy options for cystic fibrosis patients, and initiatives working to make this a reality. We're thrilled to see Phage Directory highlighted in this article, alongside other collaborators and colleagues, such as IPATH, Baylor College of Medicine's TAILOR Labs, the Queen Astrid Military Hospital, Adaptive Phage Therapeutics and more.

Christopher Duplessis and Biswajit Biswas (US Naval Medical Research Center) published a new systematic review in Antibiotics on topical phage therapy for chronically infected wounds. They also discuss their preparations for a phase II randomized, controlled clinical trial to evaluate personalized phage therapy (administered topically and/or intravenously) to treat diabetic foot ulcers.

Legesse Garedew Kifelew (Flinders University, Australia) and colleagues published a new paper in BMC Microbiology showing efficacy of a cGMP-produced phage cocktail in treating diabetic mouse wound infections caused by MRSA. They applied the cocktail topically, and saw a significant decrease in bacterial load and wound size in phage- and vancomycin-treated groups compared with infected saline-treated mice. Paper | News release.

Here's a streamlined new method for producing phages (and removing endotoxin) for personalized phage therapy, published in Nature Protocols by Tiffany Luong (San Diego State University) and colleagues.

Some bacteria release colicins to kill competitors by carefully timing lysis for part of their population at a time. But group B colicins don't come with lysis genes, so how do cells safely release them? Stefanie Spriewald (LMU Munich, Germany) and colleagues published a new paper in MBio showing that colicin release in Salmonella has cleverly evolved to make use of prophage-mediated lysis, which already optimizes for not killing the whole population at once, leading to a stable system of phage-colicin interplay.

Multicopy plasmids contribute to antimicrobial resistance gene transfer, and although many don't contain mobility genes, they've been observed to contain phage fragments. Lorena Rodríguez-Rubio (Universitat de Barcelona, Spain) and colleagues published a new paper in Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy showing just how extensively temperate phages can mobilize AMR genes on multicopy plasmids.

We don't know much about phages in groundwater reservoirs, even though bacteria in these environments are thought to influence biogeochemical cycles. Ole Hylling (Aarhus University, Denmark) and colleagues published a new paper in Scientific Reports showing isolation of two new phages, each representing a novel genus, from a groundwater reservoir, highlighting how unexplored these environments are from a phage perspective.

Only a handful of prophage genomes targeting the phytopathogen Erwinia are available. In a new paper published in Frontiers in Microbiology, Nikita Zrelovs (Latvian Biomedical Research and Study Centre) and colleagues delved into temperate Erwinia phage diversity, including characterizing a novel Erwinia persicina-infecting phage and identifying around 50 possible new prophages in Erwinia genomes.

Some phages attach to bacterial flagella, and thus have to withstand high drag and torque. But how? Joshua Hardy, Rhys Dunstan (Monash University, Australia) and colleagues published a new paper in Nature Communications that provides new insights into the architecture and stabilisation of flagellotropic phages.

The aquaculture industry continues to move toward phage therapy; here's a recent review published in Antibiotics by Justyna Kowalska (Proteon Pharmaceuticals) colleagues. Read the highlights in this article on The Fish Site.