Reinventing the fight against bacteria,
one phage at a time.

For decades, one of the greatest limitations of phage therapy has not been finding bacteriophages, but finding the right bacteriophages. Nature has produced an almost unimaginable diversity of phages, with an estimated 10³¹ viral particles present on Earth. Yet identifying which of these viruses can effectively eliminate a specific bacterial pathogen remains a complex and time-consuming process. As antimicrobial resistance continues to spread worldwide, researchers are increasingly searching for ways to accelerate phage discovery and transform what has traditionally been an artisanal process into a scalable and predictive science. ©The Phage Therapy A new study published in Nature Communications demonstrates how robotics, computer vision and artificial intelligence may help overcome this challenge. Researchers from Locus Biosciences, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and several collaborating institutions have developed one of the most advanced automated platforms yet reported for ...

For more than seventy years, the infection cycle of bacteriophage lambda has served as one of the most influential models in molecular biology. This temperate phage infecting Escherichia coli helped establish fundamental concepts in genetics, gene regulation, and cellular decision-making. Yet despite decades of investigation, one crucial question has remained largely inaccessible to experimental observation: do all phages inside the same infected bacterium behave identically, or does each viral genome make its own independent decisions? ©The Phage Therapy A new study published in Nature Communications has now provided the clearest answer yet. Using an advanced single-phage transcriptomics approach capable of monitoring individual viral genomes inside living bacterial cells, researchers from the University of Illinois have demonstrated that bacteriophages display a surprising degree of individuality during infection. Their findings reveal that different phages occupying the same bacteri...

Bacteriophages are increasingly recognized as key members of the human microbiome, yet their interactions with human cells remain poorly understood. While phages are traditionally viewed as viruses that exclusively infect bacteria, new research suggests that many gut phages can directly interact with epithelial tissues lining the intestine. A recent study has uncovered a widespread mechanism that enables common gut phages to attach to epithelial surfaces, enter host cells, and persist longer within the gastrointestinal tract. These findings reveal an unexpected level of communication between phages and the human body and may have important implications for both microbiome biology and future phage-based therapeutics. © The Phage Therapy To identify phages capable of interacting with human tissues, researchers developed a high-throughput screening platform using viral communities isolated from the feces of healthy and dysbiotic individuals. By exposing these diverse phage populations to ...