Issue 128
C&T Round Up for May 2021
This week, we're highlighting the three feature articles we published in May: a 'behind-the-paper' guest post by Steven Sutcliffe and Michael Shamash, a full recap of all six iVoM webinars by Ivone Martins and Luis Melo, and an interview with Dr. David Harper on phage therapy, past and future, by Curtis Hoffmann.
Community digest5updates3jobs4posts
Updates
Wondering whether collecting and studying phages is worth your while? Here's a new article in Cystic Fibrosis News Today that remembers Mallory Smith, a young woman who phages could have saved, if they'd only been accessible a few days earlier. The article talks about how Mallory's mom, Diane Shader Smith, has continued Mallory's legacy through speaking about her story (172 presentations to date!) and fundraising for phage therapy. We highly recommend reading Mallory's memoir, Salt in My Soul, a beautiful piece adapted from her diary entries for her last decade of life.
Carlos Guerrero-Bustamante (University of Pittsburgh) and colleagues published a new paper in MBio showing their progress toward developing a phage cocktail for tuberculosis; using genome engineering and phage genetics, they have created a five-phage cocktail effective against diverse Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains, which minimizes phage resistance and does not interfere with antibiotic efficacy.
Graça Pinto (University of Minho) and colleagues published a new paper in BMC Genomics showing insights into the genome architecture and evolution of Shiga toxin encoding phages of E. coli.
Tristan Ferry (Hospices Civils de Lyon) and colleagues published a new case report in Frontiers in Medicine describing the combination of arthroscopic “Debridement Antibiotics and Implant Retention” (DAIR) with local injection of personalized phage therapy to salvage a relapsing Pseudomonas aeruginosa prosthetic knee infection.
Shakhinur Islam Mondal (APC Microbiome Ireland) and colleagues published a new paper in International Journal of Molecular Sciences that characterizes a Clostridioides difficile-specific endolysin that affects spore outgrowth.
Jobs
The Buchan lab within the Department of Microbiology at the University of Tennessee is seeking a post-doctoral research associate to study phages that infect a member of the Roseobacter lineage of marine bacteria. Please feel free to contact Alison Buchan (abuchan@utk.edu) with any questions. They are also looking for a technician so if you know an undergrad student who wants to get hands-on experience in a lab, let them know.
Colin Hill's Gut Phageomics Lab at APC Microbiome in Cork, Ireland is seeking a wet-lab/bioinformatics postdoc and wet-lab research assistant to investigate the role of phages in health and disease.
Felix Biotechnology is hiring an Intern! As a Felix intern, you'll support Felix's efforts in developing phage therapeutics using techniques such as bacterial culture, phage/host interaction studies, and microbial genetic engineering. Contact jonathan@felixbt.com if interested!
Community board
PHAVES #18 will be a seminar by Rob McBride, co-founder of Felix Biotechnology, on Tues, June 8, 5PM Pacific time. Rob will give a talk on 'Using machine learning to design phages with enhanced therapeutic features'. Small group networking to follow! Register here for this event or future PHAVES events!
The Australian Society for Microbiology annual conference is approaching fast — next week to be exact! (May 31-June 3). Excitingly, the program features lots of phage talks! This is a hybrid event, and will run both in-person and online. Register here.
PhageSuisse will host its third webinar on June 1st at 19h00, entitled "phageSuisse meets industry" with Dr. Frenk Smrekar from JAFRAL and Dr. Lorenzo Corsini from PhagoMed.
The International Virus Bioinformatics Meeting 2022 (ViBioM 2022) will be held in Valencia, Spain, 24–25 March 2022. The meeting (currently planned to be in-person) is jointly organized by the European Virus Bioinformatics Center (EVBC), the Institute of Agrochemistry and Food Technology (IATA-CSIC), and the University of Valencia. Registration is free of charge, works on a first-come, first-serve basis and is open for 120 participants.
In this month's Capsid & Tail Monthly Round Up issue, we're highlighting the three feature articles we published in May. 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!
- Inducing prophages in gut bacteria with common oral medications — Behind the paper, by Steven Sutcliffe and Michael Shamash
- Looking back on iVoM: Six webinars covering all aspects of viruses of microbes, a recap article by Ivone Martins and Luís Melo
- Phages Before the Phrenzy: Part I — An interview with Dr. David Harper, CEO of Evolution Biotechnologies, by Curtis Hoffmann
C&T Throwback!
There's lots of great phage stuff in the C&T archive! In case you missed it, check out issue #64, which featured a guest blog post on Insights into the elusive RNA bacteriophages by Julie Callanan!
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!