Issue 170
C&T Round Up for March 2022!
This week, we highlight the features we published in March! Learn about how to name your phage, how to track your phages, and how to get pheedback from phage peers!
Community digest5updates2jobs4posts
Updates
Paper: Phage-inducible chromosomal islands promote genetic variability by blocking phage reproduction and protecting transductants from phage lysis. See also what author Rodrigo Ibarra Chavez has to say about it on twitter: "phage satellites that aren’t that selfish, providing additional benefits to their host cells”!
Paper: Learn to decipher active prophages from metagenomes using PropagAtE (Prophage Activity Estimator), an automated software tool for estimating if a prophage is in the lytic or lysogenic stage of infection
Preprint: Bacteriophages Playing Nice: Lysogenic bacteriophage replication is stable in the human gut microbiota
Preprint: Bacteriophages antagonize cGAS-like immunity in bacteria
Paper: New insights into the structure and assembly of phage P1
Jobs
Research Specialist at University of Pittsburgh in the Hatfull Lab to perform advanced experiments in a microbiology laboratory aimed at understanding phages and their infection of Mycobacterium hosts.
Research Assistant to work on a phage therapy project with Assistant Professor John Chen at the National University of Singapore (preferred: students who want to pursue PhD in microbiology). Research in the Chen lab focuses on S. aureus, phages, and pathogenicity islands.
Community board
iVoM Season 2, episode #6: Models for Viral Action. Date: 6 pm CET, April 12th, 2022. Register at https://ivom.phage.directory
Talks
- Modeling the Ecological and Therapeutic Impacts of Bacteriophage - an Imperfect Predator, by Prof. Joshua Weitz, Georgia Tech, USA
- Why are there so many short prophages? The genetic repertoire of active and cryptic prophage sequences, by Prof. Lindi Wahl, Western University, Canada
- Lord of the Broken Rings: how ATPase ring motors drive genome packaging in dsDNA viruses, by Dr. Marc Morais, Univ. of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB Health), USA
Chairs
- Dr. Matthias Fischer , Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Heidelberg, Germany
- Prof. Corina Brussaard , Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, Netherlands
The 2022 Molecular Genetics of Bacteria and Phages Meeting at University of Wisconsin, Madison is Aug 1-5, 2022 (in person!). Register now!
You're invited to Africa Phage Forum #7, which will be a talk called 'Phage Display - an old resource for new applications' by Dr. Ivone Martins. The event is currently set to take place the 12th April 2021 at 2pm GMT+3, and will last approximately 1 hour. https://apf.phage.directory/schedule/apf-webinar-7
There is now a dedicated phage sub-community on Twitter: “Phage Twitter”! Created by Sabrina Green (@Motherofphage on Twitter). Try it out here.
In this month's Capsid & Tail Monthly Round Up issue, we're highlighting the three feature articles we published in March. 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!
- The Phage Directory Slack Community, a blog post/community update by Sayde Perry
- How to keep track of phages, a blog post by Jan Zheng
- How to name a phage, a blog post by Jan Zheng
- The latest on Instill: the peer-to-peer feedback platform, a post/community update by Katharine Muscat
C&T Throwback!
There's lots of great phage stuff in the C&T archive! Check out this article on Engineering phage ΦX174’s genome: a recap of Paul Jaschke's PHAVES talk by Steph Lynch!
Thanks so much to Atif Khan for collecting links to share for 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!