Issue 182
C&T Round Up for June 2022!
This week, we highlight the feature articles we published in June! Learn about what happened when the Phage Australia team shipped a phage around the country, Jean-Paul Pirnay's views on phage therapy, and how producing phages has changed over the years.
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As we look forward to the 2022 Phage Futures Europe event, 6-7 July in Amsterdam, take a look at the 2021 post-event report, created in collaboration with PhD students from Phage Directory, Sheetal Patpatia and Aël Hardy, to gain insight into phage manufacturing, phage matching and more.
Delve deeper into these conversations at the Phage Futures 2022 event and explore new areas including new clinical data from Eligo Bioscience, Intralytix, PhageLux, improving formulation and manufacturing, computational approaches to phage cocktail design, methods for scaling up, regulatory considerations and more.
Community digest1alert5updates5jobs1post
Phage alert
Urgent need for Serratia phages for a patient in the USA
We are urgently seeking Serratia phages for a patient in the USA
Ways to help at this stage:
- By sending your phages for testing on the patient's strain
- By receiving the strain and testing your phages
- By receiving the strain and using it to search for new phages against the organism
- 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
Phase Genomics raised $5.5M from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation & NIH to catalog the viruses that infect bacteria. The resulting database could be used to develop new therapeutics & build a surveillance system to detect & respond to microbial threats.
Paper: Identification of phage receptor-binding protein sequences with hidden markov models and an extreme gradient boosting classifier. Twitter thread: ‘AI vs. bioinformatics’ — find out which one won!.
Tool: Pharokka, a dedicated fast phage annotation tool inspired by prokka. Pharokka is designed for users who want one-line, rapid, standarised and scalable phage annotations, much like prokka for prokaryotes.
Paper: Thousands of small, novel genes predicted in global phage genomes.
Blog: Using viruses to treat antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections | National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Jobs
Postdoc at University of Jyväskylä, Finland, with demonstrated experience in microbial/cell cultures, genetic analyses, and/or understanding in phage resistance and CRISPR-Cas adaptation studies in bacteria to join the international research project "Ecology of bacteriophages in mucosa during vertebrate host lifespan".
Postdoc at University of Nebraska-Lincoln to focus on the development of a live attenuated unmarked vaccine against Johne’s disease. The primary duties and responsibilities are molecular cell biology, molecular genetics, and microbiology approaches (e.g., RT-PCR, plasmid construction, phage propagation, etc.)
Research Support Officer: University of Leicester. The Phage Lab Research Group headed by Prof Martha Clokie is seeking a Research Support Officer to help manage human and agricultural phage research projects, and help progress projects through pre-clinical and clinical development.
Postdoc in the laboratory of Prof. Marek Basler at the Biozentrum of University of Basel to unravel novel phenotypes related to type 6 secretion system activity.
Research Fellow in the lab of John Chen at the National University of Singapore, to study the molecular basis of Staphylococcus aureus pathogenesis. Interests of the lab are focused on phages, pathogenicity islands, and other mobile genetic elements.
Community board
PhageSuisse is hosting a phage webinar with by Prof. Lars Fieseler from the Institute of Food and Beverage Innovation in Zurich and Wädenswil, Switzerland. He will give a talk about synergy between Erwinia amylovora tailspike protein and phage.
In this month's Capsid & Tail Monthly Round Up issue, we're highlighting the three feature articles we published in June. 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 down under: stability of a travelling phage, a blog post by Stephanie Lynch
- Phage therapy at the Queen Astrid Military Hospital: a conversation with Jean-Paul Pirnay, an interview by Madhav Madurantakam Royam
- Producing phages consistently: then and now, a blog post and interview by Kyle Jackson
C&T Throwback!
There's lots of great phage stuff in the C&T archive! Check out this article on PhageUGAL Summer School: Infecting Romanian research with phage by Colin Buttimer, Andrei Sorin Bolocan, Anca Ioana Nicolau, Joan Colom Comas, and Leontina Grigore Gurgu!
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!