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Our volunteer Atif Khan was selected for the FEMS #OnThisDay volunteer team. The #OnThisDayteam aims to assemble a collection of historically important microbiology events for every single day of the year. These events could be interesting

Evelien Adriaenssens wrote a piece for The Conversation on how thousands of phages (most of them unknown!) have been found in baby poo! The original study was done by a collaborative team from Denmark, Canada and France. And they even made

Toronto clinician Dr. Greg German: reports the first research use of a phage cocktail to treat an infection in Canada!

This article by Mart Krupovic and colleagues discusses the origin of the eukaryotic cell and the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA). They reconstructed the LECA virus repertoire and found that the origin of the LECA virome can be traced

Y. Emre Gencay and colleagues have developed engineered phages with CRISPR-Cas machinery to reduce E. coli in mice. The phages, called SNIPR001, were well tolerated in mouse models and minipigs, and out-competed their ancestral wild-type ph

Matthew C Johnson and colleagues have shown that Pseudomonas aeruginosa exhibits the greatest diversity of anti-phage systems among 30 species. They identified two core defense hotspot loci (cDHS1 and cDHS2) where many anti-phage immune sys

Nature Biotechnology paper on SNIPR001: from a library of 162 wild-type phages, eight with broad E. coli coverage were selected and engineered with tail fibers and CRISPR–Cas machinery to target E. coli. A combination of the four most compl

The Israeli Phage Therapy Center (IPTC) has received 159 requests for phage therapy, with 38% of them being for multi-drug resistant bacteria. Respiratory and bone infections were the most prevalent indications. 20 phage therapy courses wer

In this preprint, Xin Tan and colleagues show that repeated doses of phage lead to faster phage clearance in rats and monkeys. The study found that while plasma phage titer gradually decreased over time following a single dose, repeated dos

Acne treatments often require extended periods and can be expensive, leading to the exploration of phages as an alternative. This study by Daniela Torres Di Bello and colleagues found that Pa.7 phage encapsulated in liposomes is not cytotox

Jody McKerral and colleagues analyzed >2.5 million prophages from >500,000 bacterial genome assemblies, revealing that 94% are lysogens containing at least one identifiable prophage. The findings provide a new framework for identifying phag

In this review, Juan Carlos García-Cruz and colleagues discuss multiple potential applications for phages beyond classical phage therapy, including cattle raising, agriculture, pest control, microbiome modulation, and disinfection.

The UK Phage Innovation Showcase will take place May 16th, 2023 from 9:30am-4pm in Leicester and online. The event is organized by Innovate UK KTN's Phage Innovation Network and the University of Leicester's recently launched Centre for Pha

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) is organizing a Focus Group meeting on 11 May 2023 to discuss the draft guideline on the quality, safety, and efficacy requirements for bacteriophage therapy in veterinary medicines. The aim is to establi

In this podcast, Dr. Jeremy Barr from Monash University and Phage Australia talks about his research on using phages to restore antimicrobial sensitivity in Acinetobacter baumannii.

University of Warwick and Cytiva authors show that poly(acrylic acid) prevents phage-induced killing of bacterial hosts and phage replication without affecting induction of recombinant protein expression, and was more active than poly(metha

Fixed Phage, a Glasgow based biotech company, has secured £1.5m investment to further scale development and commercialisation of its phage technology in the fight against antimicrobial resistance.

Federico Prokopczuk et al. engineered a superinfective phage (eSI-Pf) based on the Pf4 phage, which is able to infect Pseudomonas aeruginosa. They tested it as a phage therapy tool for the treatment of life-threatening burn wound infections

Talia Backman and colleagues published a new preprint on how a weaponized phage suppresses competitors in historical and modern metapopulations of pathogenic bacteria. The authors discovered a viral cluster shared amongst pathogenic Pseudom

Capsules and their traits affect phage susceptibility and plasmid conjugation efficiency, as per a preprint by Matthieu Haudiquet et al. They show that capsule swaps invert phage susceptibility and affect conjugation efficiency, with implic