Issue 187
We have the best volunteers!
Our lovely phage community would not exist without the hard work of some incredible phage enthusiasts! This week, we're recognizing a few of our Phage Directory volunteers for some great stuff they've done lately.
Sponsor
Sponsor
Need help with phage manufacturing, and looking for an outsourcing partner? JAFRAL manufactures phages to the highest quality and purity, and develops manufacturing processes and analytical methods for various phage types and phage applications.
JAFRAL is the world’s only CMO/CRO that focuses primarily on production of non-GMP and GMP phages. More info at https://www.jafral.com or info@jafral.com
JAFRAL is one of Phage Directory's year-round Bronze sponsors. Thank you so much for your continued support of this community!
Community digest5updates7jobs2posts
Updates
Paper: Personalized bacteriophage therapy to treat pandrug-resistant spinal Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection. (Author Tristan Ferry tweets about how this case highlights the role of academic/public collaborations in personalized phage therapy).
Paper: Bacteriophages evolve enhanced persistence to a mucosal surface. Twitter thread by author Jeremy Barr.
Paper: Mucin induces CRISPR-Cas defense in an opportunistic pathogen.
Paper: Comparison of bacterial suppression by phage cocktails, dual-receptor generalists, and coevolutionarily trained phages.
Paper: MDR pumps as crossroads of resistance: antibiotics and bacteriophages.
Jobs
Research Assistant at Institut Cochin, Paris to work on a project (24-month contract) entitled "Characterisation of bacteria survival strategies upon bacteriophage exposure at the single cell level" under the supervision of Dr. Anne Chevallereau and Dr. Arnaud Gutierrez. The applicant should hold a MSc degree. Strong skills in Microbiology are mandatory. Experience in fluorescent microscopy or in phage biology will be appreciated. Contact us: arnaud.gutierrez@inserm.fr, anne.chevallereau@inserm.fr
Postdoc at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to examine multikingdom relationships in environmental microbiomes, with a particular focus on phage/bacteria interactions.
Research Associate at the Department of Genetics and Genome Biology, University of Leicester. This post is funded by an industry award to isolate bacteriophages against Moraxella bovis strains associated with face flies and to carry out proof of principle data to identify and formulate phages.
Experimental Officer at the University of Leicester Cryo-EM Facility. There will be opportunities to collaborate internally on exciting structural biology projects ranging from transcriptional regulation to phage biology.
Postgraduate researcher at University of Glasgow to study host pathogen interactions in Pneumococcal infection. Areas of interest include bacteriophage and pathogenicity island genetics.
Research Fellowship at the Center of Biological Engineering at the University of Minho in Portugal to work within the scope of the R&D project, PhageShaper — a high throughput platform to engineer P. aeruginosa phages for infectious disease control.
Postdoc on microbial bioinformatics in the Jiang lab at the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, USA.
Community board
Is there any interest in anyone at looking at the gut microbiome of a very small arachnida to ID bacteria and associated phages? Please contact B. Bloetscher at bbloetscher@gmail.com.
Register to attend The Phage Canada Virtual Symposia 2022! This virtual event will be held August 17th - 19th and aims to promote the exchange of ideas within the phage field, provide a forum for students and postdocs to present their research and foster interactions between phage researchers. Deadline to register is Aug 13.
Did you know that Capsid & Tail (and many other aspects of our phage community) runs on the hard work of awesome, phage-enthusiastic volunteers across 9 time zones? This week I want to highlight some of the people who make our beloved community run, and some of the work they've done lately.
Phage companies or labs, if you’re ever looking for upbeat, self-motivated, reliable team players who also happen to work with phages, you cannot go wrong with any of these star individuals! Feel free to email me anytime and I’ll gladly tell you why.
- Atif Khan, phage scientist at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in India. Atif is our ‘link-hunter’ — every week when it’s time to publish Capsid & Tail, I’m delighted to see a whole bunch of phage papers and jobs that Atif has collected. Because of Atif, our pipeline is always bursting with important findings, news and opportunities.
- Stephanie Lynch, a postdoc in the Iredell Lab working on launching Phage Australia (fun fact: after working together for years online through Phage Directory, we moved to Sydney around the same time, finally meeting in person, to work on this project!). Steph helps us write the ‘blurbs’ you see in the What’s New, Jobs and Community sections of Capsid & Tail.
- Jessica Neubauer is an MSc student at University of Vienna. Every week, she takes what we post here in Capsid and makes sure it appears on Twitter and LinkedIn too! She's also our go-to conference media person! She attended & wrote about the 4th Bacteriophage Summit, ECCMID (’Clinical microbiology meets phage at this year’s ECCMID’), and soon, we’ll publish her write-up on Phage Futures 2022!
- Madhav Madurantakam Royam is a PhD student at Warwick University. He recently conducted and wrote up two excellent in-depth interviews with phage field leaders: Phage therapy at the Queen Astrid Military Hospital: a conversation with Jean-Paul Pirnay and Intralytix, then and now: a conversation with Sandro Sulakvelidze. He also attended Phage Futures as one of our media assistants this year (stay tuned for his write-up, soon to come out!).
- Sayde Perry, an undergraduate student at Pomona College, helps keep the community in the know about opportunities and resources. She wrote about the Phage Directory Slack Community and just last month she took the initiative to create Phage Calendar, which you can subscribe to so you don’t miss phage events and deadlines! (Subscribe to the Google calendar here, or add it to your iCal with this .ics file.
- Kyle Jackson, PhD student at McMaster University, covers biotech for C&T! This year he wrote Producing phages consistently: then and now, an interview with Frenk Smrekar from JAFRAL. His article put phage GMP manufacturing into historical context, and helped us understand the important work JAFRAL is doing to make GMP phages for trials and treatments.
- Katharine Muscat, PhD student at University of Sydney, has done a great job helping us launch and manage our Instill platform for peer-peer feedback! Earlier this year she wrote an update on the Instill project. (It was great to meet her in person for the first time earlier this year too!)
There are many more volunteers who’ve helped us grow this community to what it is! A thousand thanks also to:
- Sheetal Patpatia
- Rohit Kongari
- Tolulope Oduselu
- Aël Hardy
- Lizzie Richardson
- Curtis Hoffmann
- Sabrina Green
- Adriana Carolina Hernandez
- Ella Balasa
- Cedric Lansangan
A giant THANK YOU to all of you!!
Volunteer with us! (Even if you’re super busy)
Busy scientists, you are welcome! I like to say that the great thing about volunteering with us is that you can pop in and out as your schedule permits. You can try your hand at science communication and community building, or do something small to strengthen or grow the phage community, even if you only have a little spare time or a volatile schedule.
For example, we’ve had volunteers help out for a season (or even for just one project), then move back out to focus on their lab work for half a year or even a year, then reappear and take on a project when they have time. We love this! At the time, we added volunteers to a special Slack channel where they could see new projects and choose to take something on. That Slack community is now retired.
If you think there’s something you’d like to do to help grow the phage community, please email me and let me know what sparks your interest!
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!