Issue 68
Apply for Phage Directory-VoM Writing Awards!
Attention student and postdoctoral phage biologists planning to attend Viruses of Microbes 2020 in Portugal this year! Phage Directory will be sponsoring two cash awards in collaboration with the Viruses of Microbes organizing committee, and applications are now open!
Community digest7updates2jobs4posts
Updates
The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation announced they will provide up to $5M to support Armata Pharmaceuticals in conducting a Phase 1b/2 clinical trial to test the safety and tolerability of phage therapy in Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections in people living with cystic fibrosis.
Germán Bonilla-Rosso (University of Lausanne, Switzerland) and colleagues published a new paper in PNAS on the honey bee gut virome. They show that a diverse community of phages inhabits the bee gut, that these phages target core bee gut bacteria, belong to new viral genera, and have a large repertoire of unknown functions.
Zachary Barth (UC Berkeley) and colleagues published a new preprint showing their use of RNA sequencing to study how a family of viral satellites interacts with the phages they parasitize. They found that the satellites manipulate invading phage gene expression and also affect cholera toxin mobilization. See also this informative Twitter thread on the paper by Kimberley Seed, whose lab did the study.
Elizabeth Burgener (Stanford University) and colleagues published a new preprint on methods for extracting and detecting phage DNA from CF patient sputum.
Check out this episode of the Genome Insider podcast (by the Joint Genome Institute): Gary Trubl of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory talks about the wonders of viruses that live in soil and their potential impacts on greenhouse gas release.
Tommi Vatanen, a senior research fellow at the University of Auckland-based Liggins Institute in New Zealand, will explore the role of gut phages in obesity with a new $300k Marsden Fund grant.
The first issue of Mary Ann Liebert's PHAGE journal is available now online.
Jobs
Sandia National Laboratories (Livermore, California) is seeking experienced research staff in systems biology with experience in one of: phage biology; synthetic biology and synthetic genomes; microbial-host and community interactions; microbial-materials interactions; bioinformatics, genome assembly and annotation.
The Pride Laboratory at UCSD is seeking volunteer summer phage-hunting interns. No experience required!
Community board
In memory of Merry Youle
Merry Youle, author of Thinking Like A Phage, Life in our Phage World, blogger emerita for Small Things Considered, and beloved member of the phage community, has sadly passed away.
Seeking interviewees
We're looking to explore the whole ecosystem of diarrheal disease prevention in low- and middle-income countries through short video interviews. We would particularly welcome those who are working on developing phage products in resource-limited settings. We'd love to hear your stories. Please get in touch by email (myen@phageproinc.com) if you’re interested in talking to us (we're looking to conduct interviews before April 10). Thank you for giving us your precious time, and we appreciate hearing your insights!
Seeking Mycobacterium phages
We have a cow we suspect has Johne's disease (Mycobacterium avium paratuberculosis infection). Does anyone have phages for this bacteria that might also infect M. smegmatis? Currently, there is no treatment; vaccine was discontinued in US and antibiotics would cost 50X the price of the cow. Normally you just cull the infected cattle and then need to test/monitor herd. So I figured being a phage researcher I might as well try... Please email mathieu@rice.edu.
Monash-UCSD Bacteriophage Symposium: Postponed
Hello everyone, due to the COVID-19 situation we will be postponing the Monash-UCSD Bacteriophage Symposium that was to be held in Melbourne on the 30th of March. We will instead explore online options and will update about this at a later date. Our apologies to all attendees.
Attention student and postdoctoral phage biologists planning to attend Viruses of Microbes 2020 in Portugal this year! Phage Directory will be sponsoring two cash awards (350 Euro each) in collaboration with the Viruses of Microbes organizing committee, and applications are now open!
How to apply
First, make sure you submit an abstract and register for Viruses of Microbes before the deadline. Second, write a 500-750 word guest blog article for publication in Capsid & Tail, and submit it to us between now and June 30, 2020.
About Capsid & Tail
In case you're new to this newsletter, which you're reading right now, Capsid & Tail is a weekly phage community news digest published by Phage Directory. Its purpose is to build community among phage professionals and enthusiasts around the world, highlight diverse perspectives in the phage field, and keep everyone up to date on phage news, views, research and jobs. Its subscribers (835 as of March 2020) are made up of phage researchers and developers in academia, industry and government, healthcare professionals, investors, science communicators, and more.
Each Capsid & Tail issue features a blog-style article written by someone in the phage community. Check out PhD student Julie Callanan's recent article on RNA phages as an example!
How will winners be selected?
If your article is approved for publication (meets our standards for quality), we'll add your name to a draw. We'll randomly draw two winning names, which we'll announce at the Viruses of Microbes conference. And regardless of whether you win or not, your article will be featured in an issue of Capsid & Tail!
Who is eligible?
Any undergraduate student, graduate student, or postdoctoral researcher who is registered to attend (and present an abstract at) Viruses of Microbes 2020, and who submits a guest blog article that is approved for publication in Capsid & Tail by June 30, 2020.
Writing and submitting the blog article
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Read our Guest Writer Guide so you understand Capsid & Tail's target audience (the guide also contains ideas on what to write about, and gives formatting/word limit specifications)
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As soon as you know you're interested, send a quick email to capsid@phage.directory.
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We'll send you an invite to Notion, a free app you can use to draft, edit and submit your blog post, and where you can ask us questions as you go.
Why we're doing this
We're doing this to help alleviate financial strain on students and postdocs attending VoM, but we're also doing it to help foster a community of phage professionals and enthusiasts that we've been working hard to build through Phage Directory. One way we do that is through publishing our weekly blog, and making sure it represents a wide variety of phage-related topics and perspectives. This means we aim to publish all Capsid & Tail submissions we receive through this call, provided they meet our standards for quality.
We can't wait to see your submissions, to learn more about the work you do with phages, and to help you spread the word about the great things you're doing!
Resources
Phage Directory-VoM Writing Award Details: here's where you'll find the most up-to-date award details page. Feel free to share!
Register for Viruses of Microbes 2020 here.
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!
Jan Zheng, MHCI
I'm Jan, the other half of Phage Directory, and co-write Capsid & Tail.
Previously, I did data work at Phage Australia / Westmead Institute, where I built the biobank databases, data systems, and bioinformatics workflows for the clinical trial
I have a background in computer science and human-computer interaction, and I'm currently full-time at building the agentic layer for science at Nvidia.