Issue 178
C&T Round Up for May 2022!
This week, we highlight the feature articles we published in May! Learn about the latest Mycobacterium phage treatment, how we might make our spot tests less subjective, how to get involved in DeSci, and what a phage biologist thought of this year's ECCMID.
Community digest5updates9jobs4posts
Updates
Adaptive Phage Therapeutics announced that the first patient has been dosed in its DFO Adaptive Novel Care Evaluation (DANCE™) trial, a Phase 1/2 clinical study to evaluate the safety and efficacy of APT’s precision phage therapy in patients with Diabetic Foot Osteomyelitis.
Preprint: Gram-positive bacteria evade phage predation through endolysin-mediated L-form conversion. Read author Martin Loessner’s Twitter thread on this report!
Opinion: Diversity in the soil virosphere: to infinity and beyond? Read author Simon Roux’s Twitter thread on this report!
Paper: Phage-mimicking nanoagents for rapid depolymerase specificity screening against multidrug resistant bacteria.
News article: Rediscovering phages: ‘We finally have the tools to harness them’.
Jobs
Laboratory specialist to join the Van Tyne Lab in the Division of Infectious Diseases at University of Pittsburgh, which studies how bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics and host immune defenses during human infection. Responsibilities include bacterial culture, antimicrobial susceptibility, phage susceptibility, and other phenotype testing, PCR, molecular cloning, and next-generation library preparation and sequencing.
Funded PhD position in the labs of John Kenny @ the Teagasc Food Research Centre and Jenn Mahony @ UCC. The project involves detecting intracellular phages through sequencing, coupled to traditional phage screening approaches. The candidate will validate these technologies and improve our understanding of how phages use their hosts as a Trojan horse to interfere with food fermentations.
Laboratory Researcher III in Kaelber Lab at Rutgers University to understand the molecular and structural basis of viral infection using cutting-edge structural biology methods
Research Fellow in Microbiology at Monash University
Postdoctoral Fellowship at CSIRO in Phage Therapy Bioinformatics
Research Fellow in Phage Biology/Microbiology at University of Warwick (part of Monash Warwick Alliance Combatting AMR)
Teaching Assistant in SEA-PHAGE Phage Discovery at McGill University, Canada
Lecturer in Biology at Gonzaga University
Microbiology Manager at Phico Therapeutics, UK
Community board
iVoM Season 2, hosted by ISVM, VoM 2022 and Phage Directory concluded recently with its 7th event.
The recordings of all the events are now posted on the members page!
The events spanned all aspects of viruses of microbes, and each feature 3 x 10 min talks followed by a combined Q&A and topic discussion.
If you'd like to see these videos but didn't attend the series, you can still register here.
Given that VoM 2022 is approaching next month, after a 2-year hiatus due to COVID, it's a great time to catch up on everything viruses-of-microbe!
Thanks so much to all who joined and to our speakers and chairs!
We warmly invite you to attend you to attend our 12th annual Oxford bacteriophage conference – the longest running phage conferences series in Europe – which will be held on 05-06 September 2022.
We are committed to holding this conference as a ‘virtual-in-person’ hybrid event at our traditional venue of St Hilda’s College, Oxford, UK (COVID-19 situation permitting).
Get involved in shaping the conference agenda, which will include most aspects of bacteriophage research and application in medicine, food and biotechnology. We welcome proposals for speakers and topics.
We invite emerging researchers, including final-year doctoral students and early-/mid-career postdoctoral researchers/junior group leaders to play an active role in putting together ECR symposia on topics of their interest in the field, and to apply to present.
Please email PhageOxford@gmail.com with any questions.
Hi everyone, I have isolated a few phages - 2 are Jumbo phage. I have sequnced (350 kbp) these phages. I need help in sequence analysis and can collaboratively publish it. Email: avtar2020@gmail.com
I was wondering if there was an unpublished case of a phage therapy done which I could write a case report about. If so please contact me at nameerap26@gmail.com
In this month's Capsid & Tail Monthly Round Up issue, we're highlighting the two 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!
- Spot or Not: A simple system to rate your spot tests, a blog post by Jan Zheng
- Clinical microbiology meets phage at this year's ECCMID, a blog post by Jessica Neubauer, who attended ECCMID this year
- 500 days of phage beats M. abscessus in the CF lung, a blog post diving into a recent paper from the Hatfull lab, by Jessica Sacher
- Diving into a DAO as a scientist: what does help look like? , a cross-post from 'Jessica's TechBio Adventures', by Jessica Sacher
C&T Throwback!
There's lots of great phage stuff in the C&T archive! Check out this article on ɛ²-phages: naturally bred high-tech phages which are superior to wild types in critical properties by David Sáez and Lorenzo Corsini!
Thanks so much to Atif Khan and Stephanie Lynch for collecting and summarizing 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!