Issue 146
C&T Round Up for September 2021
This week, we highlight the four feature articles we published in September! Learn about a new plaque counting app by Michael Shamash, a new plaque sizing tool by Ellina Trofimova, how Australian pediatrician Ameneh Khatami is treating kids with phages, and highlights of student- and postdoc-selected talks from Evergreen 2021!
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Phage Futures EU 2021 returns in-person in Brussels, Belgium on November 23-24! The theme will be 'Translating phage-based applications into clinically and commercially viable therapeutics'.
The 'super earlybird' deadline is Oct 1. And you can use code PHAGEDIRECTORY10 (or PD10) for a 10% discount!
Community digest5updates5jobs3posts
Updates
Adaptive Phage Therapeutics was awarded an additional $8 Million from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) for the continued development of phage therapies for the treatment of infectious diseases. The new funding brings the total DoD contract awarded to APT to $31.2 million.
Necrotizing enterocolitis is a currently unpreventable life-threatening GI disorder of preterm infants. Fecal microbiota transplantation is promising, but risks transfer of pathogenic microbes. Anders Brunse (University of Copenhagen, Denmark) and colleagues published a new paper in The ISME Journal showing transplantation of fecal filtrate (which contains phages but not bacteria) safely protects against necrotizing enterocolitis in piglets.
Elyse Stachler (Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology) and colleagues published a new paper in Applied and Environmental Microbiology showing phage treatment before chemical disinfection can enhance removal of plastic surface-associated Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
Aisling Brady (University of Glasgow, UK) and colleagues published a new paper in Current Biology showing that the arbitrium system controls prophage induction. This mechanism was explored in Bacillus subtilis.
Shiraz Shah (Copenhagen University Hospital, Denmark) and colleagues published a new paper in bioRxiv showing hundreds of viral families in the healthy infant gut. These results were obtained from sequencing and analysing fecal viromes from a cohort of 647 infants at 1 year of age.
Jobs
The MacNeill lab at the University of St Andrews (Scotland, UK) is hiring a Research Fellow to investigate the molecular genetics of DNA ligase function in T5 and T5-like phages.
The Venturini group at the University of Sydney (Sydney, Australia) is seeking a PhD student to study phage therapy for non-typhoidal Salmonella infection.
The Le Roux lab at the Station Biologique de Roscoff (Roscoff, France) is hiring two postdoctoral researchers to explore key ecological and evolutionary processes underlying phage-bacteria dynamics in the marine environment.
Eligo Bioscience (Paris, France) is seeking a molecular- and microbiology intern to help expand their collection of anaerobic bacteria and isolate phages against them, and assist with the development of high-throughput pipelines and processes to streamline these tasks. Questions? Email erica.lieberman@eligo-bioscience.com.
Felix Biotechnology, South San Francisco is hiring a chief science officer to work closely with their executive team to drive their phage platform & therapeutic portfolio.
Community board
For our next PHAVES (Tues, Oct 5 at 9AM CEST) we have Bjorn Criel, a PhD student in Yves Briers’ group, who will be talking about PhaLP: a database of Phage Lytic Proteins. Register for this and all upcoming seminars here!
Twitter call out from Ibadan Bacteriophage Research Team: Would you like to be a part of the #WorldPhageWeek Celebration (coming up in late October 2021) as an organization or a genomic company?
You can do this through the following: • Sponsored Email Adverts • Time slots for product presentation • Advert placements in the new IBRT PHAMILIA Journal
For further enquiries email the Ibadan Bacteriophage Research Team.
Congratulations to Dr. Jeremy Barr who was named a 2021 Victorian Tall Poppy Award winner! The Tall Poppy Award was created to recognise Australian intellectual and scientific excellence. Dr. Barr leads a 14-member research group at Monash University and has published pioneering work in the field of phage biology and phage therapy. He is the most cited phage researcher in the country and is an exemplary leader of his field. His work has already saved the life of one patient, and his recent discoveries are likely to soon save many more.
In this month's Capsid & Tail Monthly Round Up issue, we're highlighting the four feature articles we published in September. 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!
- Automating plaque counting with OnePetri using the power of AI — Behind the app, a post by Michael Shamash, a graduate student, to feature the new phage plaque counting app he created.
- Phage therapy for difficult-to-treat infections in children, a recap of Dr. Ameneh Khatami's PHAVES seminar by Sayde Perry & Stephanie Lynch.
- Plaque size tool: an easy bioinformatics instrument for phage plaque size measurements, an article by Ellina Trofimova, a software engineer-turned-MSc student, talking about the Plaque Size Tool she’s developed.
- A Window into Evergreen 2021 from the Next Generation of Phage Researchers, an article co-published with PHAGE Journal highlighting a set of student- and postdoc-selected talks from the Evergreen 2021 Conference.
C&T Throwback!
There's lots of great phage stuff in the C&T archive! Check out this article on Phages to treat secondary bacterial infections in COVID-19 patients by Jessica Sacher and Kathryn Kauffman!
Stephanie Lynch, PhD
Stephanie is a postdoctoral researcher for the Iredell Group at Westmead Institute for Medical Research, NSW. Her project focuses on phage therapy for compassionate human cases (as part of Phage Australia), with a particular interest in Staphylococcal phages. In 2021, Stephanie completed her thesis titled ‘Exploring phage therapy for Staphylococcus pseudintermedius infections in canines'. Steph is always willing to chat about phage research and would like to connect with phage biotech companies.