Issue 155
C&T Round Up for November 2021
This week, we highlight the feature articles we published in November! Learn about optimizing the route for phage delivery, single use bioreactor technologies vs. traditional solutions, and phage therapy to combat a shell infection in a sea turtle!
Sponsor
Sponsor
4L bioreactor bags are now available for the CellMaker bioreactor system. With working volumes from 1.5L to 4L, users can produce phage at the quantities required, in the controlled environment they need.
Community digest5updates8jobs4posts
Updates
JPIAMR (Joint Programming Initiative on Antimicrobial Resistance) has awarded funding to multiple new phage-related projects in the One Health space! Funded phage projects include:
- Use of phage applications to combat MRSA at the sow-piglet interface to reduce exposure of staff and contamination of the environment (PHAGE-EX);
- Phage treatment and wetland technology as intervention strategy to prevent dissemination of antibiotic resistance in surface waters (PhageLand);
- Phage therapy to reduce AMR Enterobacteria spread from a One Health perspective (Phage-Stop-AMR)!
Congratulations to all the awardees!
Jobs
Community board
Join us next week for the last PHAVES event of the year (#25!). There will be phages AND puppies!
Dr. Stephanie Lynch of La Trobe University will share her recently completed PhD research on phage therapy for treating Staphylococcus pseudintermedius infections in canines!
When: Tues, Dec 7 at 4PM EST // 8AM Dec 8 AEDT (Sydney, Australia).
Register at https://phaves.phage.directory/schedule/phaves-25!
phageSuisse is hosting a webinar on December 7th on "Evaluation of phage therapy for the treatment of Staphylococcus aureus endovascular infections" by Jonathan Save PhD Student – University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Register here.
Many of us are excited for the upcoming Viruses of Microbes (VoM) conference finally taking place summer 2022 in Portugal (after being rescheduled from 2020). In collaboration, the International Society for Viruses of Microorganisms (ISVM), Phage Directory, and the organizers of VoM 2022 are excited to announce Season 2 of iVoM, a series of online lectures from prominent researchers studying viruses of microbes. Seven sessions will run from December 2021 to May 2022, in the lead-up to the exciting in-person version of VoM, July 2022.
The first iVoM2 event will be Dec. 8th at 12:00 PM (noon) CET, under the theme "Control on Viral Action: regulation of viral activity by other viruses and mobile genetic elements".
It will feature talks by:
- Dr. Aude Bernheim, INSERM, France: "Systematic and quantitative view of the antiviral arsenal of prokaryotes"
- Prof. Martin Polz, Univ. of Vienna, Austria: "The dynamics of bacterial innate defenses against phage"
- Dr. Matthias Fischer, MPI for Medical Research, Germany: "The sleeper within - how endogenous virophages may defend protists against giant viruses"
Chair:
- Prof. Corina Brussaard (Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, Netherlands)
- Dr. Alex Petrovic Fabijan (Westmead Institue for Medical Research and University of Sydney, Australia)
Register at https://ivom.phage.directory!
The rest of iVoM Season 2 will take place in 2022 and consist of six additional sessions (#2-7) on the topics of:
- Raiders of the third domain
- Phage application in the One Health approach
- Endless virus diversity most beautiful
- Environmental impact of virus-host interactions
- Models for viral action
- Personalised phage therapy
Thank you to everyone that joined us for our November PHAVES, which was a seminar by Prof. Julianne Grose (phage researcher) and Dr. Whitney Greene, DVM (veterinarian) talking about phage therapy for a sea turtle — watch the recording here! If you miss any of the PHAVES events you can always watch the recordings on the Phage Directory YouTube.
In this month's Capsid & Tail Monthly Round Up issue, we're highlighting the four 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!
- Optimising the route for phage delivery, a guest blog post by Lizzie Richardson
- The Modern Laboratory: Single use bioreactor technologies vs. traditional solutions, a guest blog post by Adam Ostrowski
- Flipping the turtle back on its flippers: Phage therapy to combat a shell infection in a sea turtle, a 'behind the paper' article by Stephanie Lynch, which includes an interview with Whitney Greene
C&T Throwback!
There's lots of great phage stuff in the C&T archive! Check out "Looking back on iVoM: Six webinars covering all aspects of viruses of microbes", by Ivone Martins and Luís Melo, co-organizers of iVoM Season #1. (Catch yourself up just in time for iVoM Season #2, which starts next week!)
Many thanks to Atif Khan for finding and summarizing this week's phage news, jobs and community posts, and to Lizzie Richardson and Stephanie Lynch for help editing!
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!