Peptide-displayed phage libraries are billion-clone collections of diverse chimeric bacteriophage particles, decorated by genetically fused peptides built from a random combination of natural amino acids. Studying the molecular evolution of peptide-d...
The rapid emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria requires solutions that extend beyond conventional antibiotics. Bacteriophages (phages) provide targeted antibacterial action but face two key limitations: (1) their narrow natural host ranges and...
The emergence of antibiotic resistance has sparked interest in phage therapy, which uses virulent phages as antibacterial agents. Bacteriophage PP01 has been studied for potential bio-control of Escherichia coli O157:H7, its natural host, but in the...
The phage-resistant mutant (PRM) strains of Escherichia coli (E. coli) exhibited abundant genetic and phenotypic diversity. IS elements played a vital role in creating various genetic divergences and regulating gene functions under phage infection st...
Phage Lydia, a newly isolated siphovirus infecting Pseudomonas aeruginosa, was characterized with respect to its basic kinetic properties and subjected to comparative bioinformatic analysis with related phages. The phage exhibited a restricted host r...
Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a major opportunistic pathogen with high levels of antibiotic resistance. Phage therapy represents a promising alternative for the treatment of difficult infections both alone and in combination with antibiotics. Here, we is...
Phage therapy is the use of bacterial viruses (phages) to treat bacterial infections, a medical intervention long abandoned in the West but now experiencing a revival. Currently, therapeutic phages are often chosen based on limited criteria, sometime...
Treatments for bacterial infections can be less effective due to toxicities, bacterial tolerance, or genetic resistance to antibacterial agents. The emphasis here is on combating genetic bacterial resistance to bacteriophages. Commonly described simp...
Two novel virulent phages of the genus Obolenskvirus infecting Acinetobacter baumannii, a significant nosocomial pathogen, have been isolated and studied. Phages Brutus and Scipio were able to infect A. baumannii strains belonging to the K116 and K82...
Low performance of actively targeted nanomedicines required revision of the traditional drug targeting paradigm and stimulated the development of novel phage-programmed, self-navigating drug delivery vehicles. In the proposed smart vehicles, targetin...
Phage biology has been developing for the last hundred years, and the potential of phages as tools and treatments has been known since their early discovery. However, the lack of knowledge of the molecular mechanisms coded in phage genomes hindered t...
Multidrug-resistant (MDR) strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae present an acute threat as they continue to disseminate globally. Phage therapy has shown promise as a powerful approach to combat MDR infections, but narrow phage host ranges make developmen...
Phage lytic proteins are a clinically advanced class of novel enzyme-based antibiotics, so-called enzybiotics. A growing community of researchers develops phage lytic proteins with the perspective of their use as enzybiotics. A successful translation...
Cyanophages are characterized by vast genomic diversity and the formation of stable ecotypes over time. The evolution of phage diversity includes vertical processes, such as mutation, and horizontal processes, such as recombination and gene transfer....
Sheath proteins comprise a part of the contractile molecular machinery present in bacteriophages with myoviral morphology, contractile injection systems, and the type VI secretion system (T6SS) found in many Gram-negative bacteria. Previous research...
More than a century ago, bacteriophages (phages) were discovered as entities that could both replicate and dramatically reduce bacterial culture turbidities. By the late 1940s, phage impact on broth turbidity was being studied using electronic detect...
The ideal bacteriophages (phages) for the treatment of bacterial disease (phage therapy) would bypass bacterial evolution to phage resistance. However, this feature (called a hyper-aggression feature) has never been observed to our knowledge. Here, w...
Recently, we developed a spatial phage-assisted continuous evolution (SPACE) system. This system utilizes chemotaxis coupled with the growth of motile bacteria during their spatial range expansion in soft agar to provide fresh host cells for iterativ...
Bacteriophages are powerful drivers of microbial evolution and are increasingly explored as alternatives to antibiotics against multidrug-resistant pathogens such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Here, we describe the isolation, phenotypic characterization...
Background/Objectives: The bacterium Brochothrix campestris is closely related to Brochothrix thermosphacta, a known food spoilage agent, and Listeria monocytogenes, the causative agent of listeriosis. B. campestris garnered attention several years a...
The French Phage Network (Phages.fr) has continuously grown since its foundation, eight years ago. The annual conference, held at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, attracted 164 participants from the 11th to the 13th of October 2022. Researchers from ac...
Phage φ29 and related bacteriophages are currently the smallest known tailed viruses infecting various representatives of both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. They are characterised by genomic content features and distinctive properties...
Black leg and soft rot are devastating diseases causing up to 50% loss of potential potato yield. The search for, and characterization of, bacterial viruses (bacteriophages) suitable for the control of these diseases is currently a sought-after task...
Antibiotic resistance evolution in bacteria indicates that one of the challenges faced by phage therapy is that, sooner or later, bacteria will evolve resistance to phages. Evidently, this is the case of every known antimicrobial therapy, but here th...
The human gut contains an expanse of largely unstudied bacteriophages. Among the most common are crAss-like phages, which were predicted to infect Bacteriodetes hosts. CrAssphage, the first crAss-like phage to be discovered, contains a protein encodi...
The study of bacteriophages (viruses of bacteria) includes a variety of approaches, such as structural biology, genetics, ecology, and evolution, with increasingly important implications for therapeutic and industrial uses. Researchers working with p...
The phage surface display technology is a useful tool to screen and to extend the spectrum of metal-binding protein structures provided by nature. The directed evolution approach allows identifying specific peptide ligands for metals that are less ab...
Attracting about 100 participants, the fifth edition of our French Phages.fr annual conference was once more a success. This year’s conference took place at the Institute for Structural Biology on the European Electron and Photon Campus in Gren...
Bacteriophages represent an alternative strategy to combat pathogenic bacteria. Currently, Mycobacterium tuberculosis infections constitute a major public health problem due to extensive antibiotic resistance in some strains. Using a non-pathogenic s...
Background/Objective: The rise of multidrug-resistant bacteria underscores the urgent need for alternative antimicrobial strategies. Metal-based compounds and bacteriophage (phage) therapy have emerged as promising candidates, but the evolutionary tr...
In this study, we looked at the population dynamics of a two phages-one host system using phages vB_EcoP_SU10 (SU10) and vB_EcoD_SU57 (SU57) and the bacteria Escherichia coli, strain ECOR57. Phage-specific growth curves were observed where infections...
The Spanish Network of Bacteriophages and Transducer Elements (FAGOMA) was created to answer the need of Spanish scientists working on phages to exchange knowledge and find synergies. Seven years and five meetings later, the network has become a frui...
The development of phage engineering technology has led to the construction of a novel type of phage display library—a collection of nanofiber materials with diverse molecular landscapes accommodated on the surface of phage particles. These new...
Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria. After their discovery in the early 1900s, bacteriophages were a primary cure against infectious disease for almost 25 years, before being completely overshadowed by antibiotics. With the rise of antibi...
An opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa has a versatile phenotype and high evolutionary potential to adapt to various natural habitats. As the organism normally lives in spatially heterogeneous and polymicrobial environments from open fields...
Prostate cancer (PC) is the second most diagnosed cancer among men. It was observed that early diagnosis of disease is highly beneficial for the survival of cancer patients. Therefore, the extension and increasing quality of life of PC patients can b...
The increase in antimicrobial resistance has raised questions about how to use these drugs safely, especially in veterinary medicine, animal nutrition, and agriculture. Escherichia coli is an important human and animal pathogen that frequently contai...
Background: The host ranges of individual phages tend to be narrow, yet many applications of phages would benefit from expanded host ranges. Empirical methods have been developed to direct the evolution of phages to attack new strains, but the method...
Presented here are additional explanations for five key points offered by Rojero et al. in their 2025 publication in this journal, regarding characteristics of hyper-aggressive phage 0524phi7-1. These are (i) that the “bypassing of the evolutio...
The review uses the Helicobacter pylori, the gastric bacterium that colonizes the human stomach, to address how to obtain information from bacterial genomes about prophage biology. In a time of continuous growing number of genomes available, this rev...
Bacteriophage genomes represent an enormous level of genetic diversity and provide considerable potential to acquire new insights about viral genome evolution. In this study, the genome sequences of sixteen Bacillus-infecting bacteriophages were expl...
Bacteria and phages are two of the most abundant biological entities in the gut microbiome, and diet and host phylogeny are two of the most critical factors influencing the gut microbiome. A stable gut bacterial community plays a pivotal role in the...
Previous studies have identified diverse bacteriophages that infect Caulobacter vibrioides strain CB15 ranging from small RNA phages to four genera of jumbo phages. In this study, we focus on 20 bacteriophages whose genomes range from 40 to 60 kb in...
Antibiotic-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa presents a critical global health challenge, particularly in hospital-acquired infections. Bacteriophages offer a promising therapeutic avenue due to their ability to target and lyse resistant strains. This...
The T5-like siphoviruses DT57C and DT571/2, isolated from horse feces, are very closely related to each other, and most of their structural proteins are also nearly identical to T5 phage. Their LTFs (L-shaped tail fibers), however, are composed of tw...
In Germany, phage research and application can be traced back to the beginning of the 20th century. However, with the triumphal march of antibiotics around the world, the significance of bacteriophages faded in most countries, and respective research...
The bacterial biofilm constitutes a complex environment that endows the bacterial community within with an ability to cope with biotic and abiotic stresses. Considering the interaction with bacterial viruses, these biofilms contain intrinsic defense...
In recent decades, phage therapy has been overshadowed by the widespread use of antibiotics in Western countries. However, it has been revitalized as a powerful approach due to the increasing prevalence of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria. Although b...
Biosensor research is a swiftly growing field for developing rapid and precise analytical devices for biomedical, pharmaceutical, and industrial use and beyond. Herein, we propose a phage-based biosensor method to develop a sensitive and specific sys...
Pseudomonas phage MD8 is a temperate phage isolated from the freshwater lake Baikal. The organisation of the MD8 genome resembles the genomes of lambdoid bacteriophages. However, MD8 gene and protein sequences have little in common with classified re...
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