#phage

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

"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

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

I don't want to get too excited yet, but latest sequencing results suggest we might have found two new species of bacteria. And one of them is a linchpin to the #phage polyvalence study I've been working on for the past year.

Crossing fingers on this one!

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

Bacteriophage Typing

#Bacteria, #Bacteriophase, #Phage, #PhageTyping, #Virology #Microbiology Bacteriophages are viruses of bacteria i.e. they attack members of a particular bacterial species, or strains within a species. Bacteriophage…. Medical Microbiology & Recombinant DNA Technology (RDT) Labs | Read More -

https://micrordt.wordpress.com/2024/04/30/bacteriophage-typing/

Bacteriophages

#Bacteriophase, #EclipsePhase, #LatentPeriod, #LysogenicCycle, #LyticCycle, #Phage #Virology Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria. They are commonly called as ‘phages’. Phages occur widely in nature in close association…. Medical Microbiology & Recombinant DNA Technology (RDT) Labs | Read More -

https://micrordt.wordpress.com/2024/04/26/bacteriophages/

It's #phage week
@PLOSBiology!

First up, Ellinor Alseth, Edze Westra and colleagues describe the impact of phage & phage resistance on microbial community dynamics
https://plos.io/49OSE9i

Then Jennifer Bomberger and colleagues show that #lytic phages induce #cytokine release from human respiratory epithelium in a cool cross-kingdom interaction
https://plos.io/44dOUgu

#LoveVirology

Going down #phage annotation rabbit hole of a very peculiar cluster with newly discovered members.

I'm curious, given the mosaic nature of these things, does the gene order really matter in an idealized, hypothetical scenario? Or are they just results of convenient evolutionary inertia?

#microbiology

Scientists discover new #phage #resistance mechanism in phage-#bacterial arms race.

#red_queen #co_evolution

https://phys.org/news/2024-04-scientists-phage-resistance-mechanism-bacterial.html

I'm becoming more fascinated with impractical heatmap plots treating variety of genomes and genes - viral, microbial, and etc.

Depending on alignment alignment and clustering method, I sometimes run into some pretty unexpected crossovers - like in case of these scattered phage genome fragments we 're currently investigating. It's like exploring some chart of stars, in a way.

#phage #amateurbiology #plot

This one is interesting:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.20.585998v1

Plaque free culturing of crAssphage shows extrachromosomal phage-plasmid persistence.

#microbiology #phage #preprint

Trailer for a FASCINATING new documentary about phage therapy. By 2050, it is expected that more people will die from infections with antimicrobial resistant organisms than cancer and accidents combined. We need to look into other options. This shows a lot of potential. It also highlights some novel careers that will be appearing in biotech/biohealth in the very near future.

https://vimeo.com/873871964/7394fcf208?share=copy

#phage #sciencejobs #biology #viruses #documentary #AMR

@biology@newsmast.community @biology@a.gup.pe @science @ScienceDesk @science-news-theverge

Another interesting observation from a phage pipeline I'm working on.

The block of genomes on upper left demarcated in red potentially represents previously unknown cluster of phages. My money's on a captured ancestral phage inherited among modern day hosts. Exciting stuff!

#phage #microbiology #bioinformatics