#phage — Public Fediverse posts

2'3'-cGAMP-induced membrane shearing promotes broad antiphage immunity.

CBASS 3TM‑SAVED effectors form cGAMP‑linked filaments that shear membranes and induce death.

#OpenAccess #virology #immunology #microbiology #phage #bacteriophage

https://davidojcius.blogspot.com/2026/04/23-cgamp-induced-membrane-shearing.html

How do #bacteriophage life history strategies influence host invasion & inter- #phage competition in #biofilms? This study shows that spatial structure shapes invasion success, favoring temperate phages over lytic ones when diffusion is limited @PLOSBiology https://plos.io/47Aripq

Molecular basis for anti-jumbo phage #immunity by AVAST type 5.

Avs5 detects an early jumbo‑phage activator and halts infection by rapidly hydrolyzing NAD+.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1097276526000249 #phage #bacteriophage #microbiology

Show HN: Phage Explorer
https://phage-explorer.org/
#ycombinator #phage #bacteriophage #bioinformatics #genome_visualization #DNA_sequence #amino_acid #lambda_phage #virology #microbiology

"The very discovery of phage was the subject of a prolonged dispute between two camps: on one side was Félix d’Herelle,Citation5 the French-Canadian autodidact who first recognize ..."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.4161/bact.20757

#InfectiousDisease #Medicine #phage

A pleasure to have @mfwhite2.bsky.social for our first #BiosciencesInstitute seminar this year and hearing all about #bacterial #phage defences

#AI can now design functional #viruses - not the computer kind, either
Inject this synthetic #phage into #Ecoli and it kills better than the real thing
#Bacteriophages, are viruses that infect bacteria, have been widely studied since their discovery in the early 20th century. The end result of the AI portion of the project was a pool of 302 candidate #genomes, 285 of which were able to generate full genomes. Of those, 16 were found to inhibit growth of E. coli #bacteria.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/18/researchers_just_created_a_working/

1/5

Today I finished reading the non-fiction book The Good Virus, by Tom Ireland. Picked it up somewhat at random since I don't usually read non-fiction, and I'm not usually into biology.

But it turned out to be an excellent book, perhaps the best book I've read this year.

https://www.amazon.com/Good-Virus-Amazing-Forgotten-Promise-ebook/dp/B0BHPRSWFT/

#bookreview #bookstodon #phage

"Entelli-02 exhibits 88% host coverage against The Alfred Hospital’s ECC isolate collection (n = 206), confirmed by plaque formation and reduced bacterial load in septicaemic mice by >99%. We produced this cocktail as a therapeutic-grade product, ready for clinical use. Entelli-02 represents a hospital-specific phage cocktail with frontline efficacy and on-demand availability."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-025-02130-4

#phage

I'm having a blast testing out Phold from @GB13Faithless - new preprint available here:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.05.668817v1

Protein language model & structural alignment aided annotation. It immediately picked out some interesting replication genes from a prophage region I've been wrecking my head over for a while now.

https://github.com/gbouras13/phold

Worth checking out!

#bioinformatics #phage #microbiology

Interesting.

BBC News: I found a bacteria-eating #virus in my loo - could it save your life?

#bacteria #phage #PhageTherapy #antibiotics

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czryvm3nlvdo

#Phage-induced #protection against lethal #bacterial #reinfection, https://etidiohnew.blogspot.com/2025/06/phage-induced-protection-against-lethal.html

A precursor procapsid is initially formed during #bacteriophage assembly, but how? The #cryoEM structure of the scaffolding protein complex & portal within #phage P22 procapsid reveals how this complex orchestrates the initiation of procapsid assembly @PLOSBiology https://plos.io/44B71iE

PHORCE allows measurement of lytic #phage amplification rates in bacterial populations. This study uses PHORCE to reveal phenotypic diversity among #Ecoli & #Paeruginosa phages; phage- #antibiotic interactions are mainly determined by the drug @PLOSBiology https://plos.io/3G2myhf

How does the lysogenic-lytic cycle work in intestinal #bacteriophages? @dbikard &co show that hankyphage produces defective viral particles & identify RepCHP as master repressor of this #phage's lytic cycle #plosbiology https://plos.io/41Rr22S

The Zorya Anti-Phage Defense System sounds like a hardcore sci-fi missile defense deployed by the Xanthan Conglomerate over their Ytterbium mines. It isn’t, but it kinda sounds like it is.

https://phys.org/news/2025-01-bacteria-anti-missile-defense-fend.html

#bacteria #phage #scifi #medicine #biology #antiviral

Nice work by Sanika Vaidya (and collegues)
done during our PhDs together at @maxplanckgesellschaft and @unibasel

Peptidoglycan triggers #biofilm formation across bacterial species.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-024-01886-5

#openaccess #mpg #mpitm #phage #V_cholerae #bacteria #nature #microbiology #science #research

"We developed a method of #phage-assisted continuous evolution we call IntePACE..to systematically improve activity of PhiC31 & Bxb1 serine integrases..hyperactive mutants were generated..resulting in integration of a multi-gene cargo at rates as high as 80%..Hyperactive integrases inserted a 15.7 kb therapeutic #DNA cargo..This #technology could accelerate #gene delivery #therapeutics & our directed evolution strategy can easily be adapted to improve novel #integrases"

https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/52/14/e64/7702507?login=false

@helenczerski

How phages work:

Source: VIRUS, 2016
Dr Marilyn J Roossinck
Foreword by Carl Zimmer

101 INCREDIBLE MICROBES FROM CORONAVIRUS TO ZIKA

#books
#virus
#phage

Coinfecting #viruses obstruct each other's cell invasion https://phys.org/news/2024-08-coinfecting-viruses-obstruct-cell-invasion.html Paper: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(24)00675-4

When there were more #phages attached to the surface of the cell, relatively fewer of them were able to enter... the first stage of infection, #phage entry, is an important step that was previously underappreciated... the coinfecting phages were impeding each other's entry by perturbing the #electrophysiology of the cell.

Passionate about phages? 🤩 Apply by July 31 to join Jens Hör’s research group as a doctoral researcher! In #HIRI’s Hör lab, you will study how bacteria defend themselves against #RNA #phage infection and decipher the molecular mechanisms of this defense. More at: https://www.helmholtz-hiri.de/en/jobs-talents/working-at-hiri/

i did a Summer internship studying homing introns in college. big advance!

"This work demonstrates how a homing endonuclease can be deployed in interference competition among viruses and provide a relative fitness advantage. Given the ubiquity of homing endonucleases, this selective advantage likely has widespread evolutionary implications in diverse plasmid and viral competition as well as virus-host interactions."

#homing #endonuclease #phage #bacteriophage #virus

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl1356

#ThrowbackThursday to my favorite author contribution statement of all time: “Theory by M. D., experiments by S. E. L.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1209226/

Luria and Delbrück, 1943, Mutations of Bacteria from Virus Sensitivity to Virus Resistance. Genetics 28, 491-511.

#Genetics #Phage #HistoryOfScience

Host immunity in phage therapy:
"Bacteriophage immune neutralization was observed between 6 and 35 days after initiation of BT in 5 of 13 (38.5%) screened patients (9, 13, 20, 66 and 92 in Table 2 and Fig. 4a–d). Bacteriophage immune neutralization always involved invasive (intravenous and/or intralesional) bacteriophage administrations. In 4 of these 5 cases (patients 9, 13, 20 and 92), clinical improvement and eradication of the targeted bacterial pathogen were nevertheless observed."
Fm Pirnay et al, Nat Microbiology 2024.
#Immunology #Phage #AntibioticResistance
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-024-01705-x?utm_campaign=related_content&utm_source=HEALTH&utm_medium=communities#Sec11

My new story for the Medical Post/Canadian Healthcare Network.
#Doctors and #pharmacists in Canada can log on for free. Here are a few paragraphs.

Could a century old treatment be an answer to antibiotic resistance?
In a first in Canada, a patient with an #antibiotic resistant artificial joint infection has received treatment with phage therapy and is showing promising early responses.

“This is cutting edge stuff, and a potentially new technology,” said Dr. Marisa Azad, the infectious diseases physician who treated the patient. She is also an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Ottawa.

The patient presented with severe periprosthetic joint infection (PJI) in the summer of 2023. She had already undergone multiple surgeries and had experienced several relapses and infections with the same persistent bacteria.

“She’d been on multiple very prolonged courses of antibiotics and had a severe drug allergy to two major drug classes of antibiotics. I was extremely limited in what I could use to treat her,” Dr. Azad told the Medical Post in an interview.

That’s when the idea arose of trying an experimental treatment course with phage therapy. The team got approval for doing the experimental treatment from Health Canada, and worked with Winnipeg-based Cytophage, which supplied the phages.

“We developed a protocol and gave her therapy over two weeks while she was admitted to hospital. She’s completed her therapy. Now we’re monitoring her closely and giving her adjunctive antibiotics,” she said.

The idea didn’t come out of the blue. In the medical literature, a study from just last year in Clinical #Infectious Diseases provided a review of 33 previously published cases of patients with end-stage, refractory bone and joint infections (BJI) who underwent treatment with phage therapy. The authors found that from those case reports, “29 (87%) achieved microbiological or clinical success, two (5.9%) relapsed with the same organisms, and two (5.9%) with a different organism” with no serious adverse events.

The conclusions of that paper stated there were “important advantages, disadvantages, and barriers to the implementation of phage therapy for BJIs.” Yet, at the same time, the authors added they, “believe that if phage therapy were to be used earlier in the clinical course, fewer cumulative antibiotics may be needed in an individual treatment course.”

The word phage is short for #bacteriophage, a word coined in 1917—literally meaning bacteria-eater. They are viruses whose lifecycle depends on certain types of bacteria.

“They latch on to specific types of bacteria and inject their genetic material into the bacterial cell." Dr. Azad explained. "They take over the bacterial cells’ machinery to produce more little viruses inside and explode or burst open the bacteria,” releasing viral particles that can go and infect other cells of the same type of bacteria.

Intriguingly, each #phage targets a specific type of #bacteria...
The story of phages started over 100 years ago. They were independently discovered, first in 1915 by a British pathologist, Frederick Twort, and then again in 1917 by French-Canadian microbiologist Felix d’Herelle. And...

#MedMastodon #IDmastodon #microbiology @medmastodon
https://www.canadianhealthcarenetwork.ca/could-century-old-treatment-be-answer-antibiotic-resistance

When considering #PhageTherapy, are there any direct effects of #phage on the human host? @jbombscientist &co show that therapeutic phages can be detected by human #RespiratoryTract epithelial cells & can elicit #proinflammatory responses. #PLOSBiology https://plos.io/44dOUgu

Filamentous Phage Shields https://schaechter.asmblog.org/schaechter/2024/03/filamentous-phage-shields.html @STCmicrobeblog

Phage liquid crystalline droplets form occlusive sheaths that encapsulate and protect infectious rod-shaped #bacteria (2020) https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1917726117

"in #biofilms and due to the presence of #ExtracellularMatrix #polymers, Pf4 #phage particles form highly ordered yet dynamic #LiquidCrystals (tactoids) that surround the cells. Quite interestingly, these #tactoids confer on the cells an increased tolerance to #antibiotics."

Just came across this helpful figure on the milestones of #phage research and #phagetherapy from a recent @PLOSBiology Essay, which is a highly recommended (and easy to read) deep dive into the topic
#LoveVirology

https://plos.io/3opYH2J

#Phages are key drivers of #MicrobialEvolution, but many #phage genes are poorly understood. @denish_piya @AdamArkinLab @vivek_mutalik &co use arrayed genome-wide #CRISPRi to map gene the essentiality landscape in the iconic coliphages λ & P1. #PLOSBiology https://plos.io/3uLtzgU

#Phages are key drivers of #MicrobialEvolution, but many #phage genes are poorly understood. @denish_piya @AdamArkinLab @vivek_mutalik &co use arrayed genome-wide #CRISPRi to map gene the essentiality landscape in the iconic coliphages λ & P1. #PLOSBiology https://plos.io/3uLtzgU

#Phages are key drivers of #MicrobialEvolution, but many #phage genes are poorly understood. @denish_piya @AdamArkinLab @vivek_mutalik &co use arrayed genome-wide #CRISPRi to map gene the essentiality landscape in the iconic coliphages λ & P1. #PLOSBiology https://plos.io/3uLtzgU

#Phages are key drivers of #MicrobialEvolution, but many #phage genes are poorly understood. @denish_piya @AdamArkinLab @vivek_mutalik &co use arrayed genome-wide #CRISPRi to map gene the essentiality landscape in the iconic coliphages λ & P1. #PLOSBiology https://plos.io/3uLtzgU

#Phages are key drivers of #MicrobialEvolution, but many #phage genes are poorly understood. @denish_piya @AdamArkinLab @vivek_mutalik &co use arrayed genome-wide #CRISPRi to map gene the essentiality landscape in the iconic coliphages λ & P1. #PLOSBiology https://plos.io/3uLtzgU

'Genome sequencing has also become a critical component in the development of one of the most promising alternatives to antibiotics: bacteriophage therapy.'

#Microbiology #Phage #PhageTherapy

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002225

(Paywall) Book: The forgotten future of the phage
As antibiotic resistance soars, a journalist revisits an often overlooked antimicrobial strategy
"...in 2019, a report released by the United Nations predicted that antimicrobial resistance could force up to 24 million people into extreme poverty by 2030 and cause up to 10 million annual deaths by 2050. Journalist Tom Ireland’s The Good Virus, which recounts the intriguing history of a different type of antibiotic principle, a process by which viruses known as bacteriophages or phages destroy bacteria, is thus incredibly timely for its potential to renew interest in an orthogonal antimicrobial modality." #phage #PhageTherapy #antibiotics #books #nonfiction #medicine #reading
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adi5079

New preprint from Banfield lab. Curated project-specific #phage database essential to study.

Infant gut bacteriophage strain persistence during the first three years of life https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.08.07.552389v1

#microbiome #virome

Excellent opportunity for anyone wanting to undertake a postdoc in #phage research, with Professor Andrey Shkoporov https://twitter.com/AShkoporov at University College Cork. Contact Andrey directly about this position.

#microbiome #virome #HGT

Excellent opportunity for anyone wanting to undertake a postdoc in #phage research, with Professor Andrey Shkoporov https://twitter.com/AShkoporov at University College Cork. Contact Andrey directly about this position.

#microbiome #virome #HGT

Excellent opportunity for anyone wanting to undertake a postdoc in #phage research, with Professor Andrey Shkoporov https://twitter.com/AShkoporov at University College Cork. Contact Andrey directly about this position.

#microbiome #virome #HGT

Excellent opportunity for anyone wanting to undertake a postdoc in #phage research, with Professor Andrey Shkoporov https://twitter.com/AShkoporov at University College Cork. Contact Andrey directly about this position.

#microbiome #virome #HGT

Excellent opportunity for anyone wanting to undertake a postdoc in #phage research, with Professor Andrey Shkoporov https://twitter.com/AShkoporov at University College Cork. Contact Andrey directly about this position.

#microbiome #virome #HGT

For Throwback Thursday, an episode of the @EMBO Podcast on the clinical use of #phage to treat antibiotic resistant bacterial infection - with a brief stop at the Siege of Leningrad.
Featuring pediatric infectious disease physician Ameneh Khatami, historian Dmitriy Myelnikov, and Jessica Sacher of Phage Directory.

#EMBOPodcast #SciComm #PhageTherapy #Phage #antibioticresistance #sciencepodcast

https://www.embo.org/podcasts/the-enemy-of-my-enemy/

Phages... So many #phage and they are all #prophage integrated into a #bacteria #genome

A few million prophages from > million bacterial genomes

Are prophages good or bad for bacteria? The data shows they provide heaps of benefits

The paper is in #biorxiv and the data is on #figshare

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.20.537752v1

https://open.flinders.edu.au/projects/Prophage_predictions/162127

"A Leap of Faith, Part 2" is now posted https://telliamedrevisited.wordpress.com/2023/02/21/a-leap-of-faith-part-2/
#science #evolution #microbiology #education #LearningFromMistakes #Phage #Bacteria #mentoring #careers

"A Leap of Faith, Part 2" is now posted https://telliamedrevisited.wordpress.com/2023/02/21/a-leap-of-faith-part-2/
#science #evolution #microbiology #education #LearningFromMistakes #Phage #Bacteria #mentoring #careers