Issue 104
C&T Round Up for November 2020
This week, we're highlighting the four feature articles we published in November: two interviews, a guest blog post, and a recap of the month's PHAVES event!
Community digest1alert5updates3jobs6posts
Phage alert
Add your voice to the State of Phage 2020 Survey!
In celebration of our 100th issue of Capsid & Tail, we launched a survey called State of Phage 2020! We created this survey to help us all better understand the phage research community globally, including what kind of phages people are collecting, what methods they're using, and more. If you work with phages, please fill it out! We'll compile and share the results in Capsid & Tail in 2021, and repeat the survey annually so we can all follow and share our community's exciting growth over time.
SURVEY CLOSES IN 24 HOURS
Thanks so much to the 134 labs who've completed the survey, and to those who have shared it!! Today is the last day the survey will be open, so if you've started but haven't finished (58 of you — your browser should have saved your progress!) or you want to take it from the beginning, please fill it out today!
We'd love if you continued sharing it with friends! https://survey.phage.directory/
Updates
Diane Shader Smith and Mark Smith have established Mallory's Legacy Fund. Their daughter Mallory was one of the first cystic fibrosis patients to receive phage therapy (and she inspired Phage Directory's start!). Donations will support phage therapy research projects. Watch this 2-min video on Mallory's story, and donate here.
Dr. David Pride (IPATH, UCSD) wrote a great Scientific American article on the complexity of viruses and the human body. He talks about the tricky tasks of mapping where they are and how they spread, and managing the bad ones while exploiting the good ones. Great for sharing with your families who are undoubtedly asking you more about your work on viruses this year than ever before...
PhagoMed's synthetic phage lysin platform for treatment of bacterial vaginosis came in second place (and won 20,000 Euro) in the European Institute of Innovation and Technology's 2020 Health Catapult contest.
Karthik Chamakura (Center for Phage Technology and Texas A&M) and colleagues published a new paper in Nature Communications on host lysis genes discovered in leviviruses, which are single-stranded RNA phages. They characterized the function of these lysis genes in 244 leviviral genomes, and suggest this could be a rich new source of phage protein-based antimicrobials.
Shannon Miller (Broad Institute) and colleagues published a new paper in Nature Protocols on phage-assisted continuous and non-continuous evolution. This method allows directed evolution to occur much faster (100 rounds of evolution in 2 weeks), with minimal researcher intervention.
Jobs
Clara Torres-Barceló (Plant Pathology Institute, INRAE, Avignon, France) has an opening for an 18-month contract as research assistant to work on the project "Characterisation of Erwinia amylovora phages in order to develop a biocontrol tool against fire blight." She is seeking a highly motivated candidate with a Master's degree and molecular biology, microbiology and bioinformatics experience. Working language is French or English. Please submit CV + motivation letter to clara.torresbarcelo@inrae.fr by Dec 15.
The Blower group at Durham University (Durham, UK) is hiring a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Microbiology and Biochemistry to investigate BREX and phage-bacteria interactions.
ContraFect (Yonkers, New York), a clinical-stage biotech company focused on discovery and development of protein therapeutics (including phage lysins) is hiring a Director of Research Laboratory.
Community board
My name is Tom Ireland and I'm a science writer based in the UK working on a popular-science book about phages. Under contract with a major publisher, the book aims to bring the wonder of phages to a mass audience, telling the fascinating history of phage science and exploring what phages can do for us in science, medicine and the environment.
I am currently making contact with phage scientists from across the world as part of my research, and I want to ask anyone who wishes to be featured to get in touch with me. I'm really keen to get to know lots of phage scientists, visit lots of phage labs and follow lots of different aspects of phage work in the course of my research. Please contact me at tomjireland@gmail.com.
The fourth iVoM event will be Thursday, December 17, 7pm GMT, and the theme will be "Virus-host interaction: molecular mechanisms".
Talks:
- New discoveries on the immune system of bacteria — Rotem Sorek
- The regulation and activity of Class 1 CRISPR-Cas systems — Peter Fineran
- Molecular hijacking of Pseudomonas — Rob Lavigne
Chairs: Karen Maxwell and Julia Frunzke
Register for the whole series or for individual events at https://ivom.phage.directory.
The recording for iVoM #2 (Virus Structure and Function with Petr Leiman, Kristin Parent and Pascale Boulanger) has been posted on the VoM 2020 Youtube channel!
(POSTPONED TO 2021) Save the date for the next rendition of PHAVES, a seminar with Dr. Jonathan Iredell, MD of the Westmead Institute for Medical Research and University of Sydney on Wed, Dec 16 at 8AM AEDT (Tues, Dec 15 at 4PM Eastern Time/10PM CET). He will give a talk entitled Phage Therapy: The Australian Experience. Small group networking to follow! Register here!
Two upcoming phage webinars organized by the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science:
- From Petri Dish to Patient: Mycobacteriophages and Their Therapeutic Potential (December 8): Register here.
- Phage and Antibiotics: Induction of an Antibacterial Type 7 Secretion System in Enterococcus faecalis (December 16): Register here.
This week included Giving Tuesday, and some of you likely donated to Phages for Global Health (PGH). A message from the PGH team: "Thank you so much for your gifts yesterday — between your contributions and matching funds we raised over $18,000 in just 24 hours! That's the most we've ever received through crowdfunding in a single day." If you'd like to donate or learn more, do so here!
In this month's Capsid & Tail Monthly Round Up issue, we're highlighting the three feature articles we published in November. 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!
- Training phage scientists in developing countries: An interview with Prof. Martha Clokie, an interview by journalist Clément Girardot
- Finding the good in phage resistance, and balancing research with conference organizing: a Q&A with Prof. Zuzanna Drulis-Kawa, by Rodrigo Monteiro and Graça Pinto
- Ibadan Bacteriophage Research Team: A SEA-PHAGES team with a difference, a blog post by Tolulope Oduselu and Olubusuyi Adewumi
- Engineering phage ΦX174's genome: a recap of November's PHAVES talk, a recap of Dr. Paul Jaschke's PHAVES talk by Stephanie Lynch
C&T Throwback!
There's lots of great phage articles in the C&T archive! Remember this article on raising phage therapy awareness among doctors by Aël Hardy?
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!