Abstract
Hello everybody! It has been an interesting few months here in the United Kingdom, with fewer restrictions in the way we work in our laboratories and life gradually resembling something we used to know before COVID-19. I hope people's situations in general are starting to get better and that your families and phage families are doing well. As traveling is still not so easy—we bring you here a fascinating set of phage stories from Malaysia to the Côte d'Ivoire through Italy, the United States, and India!
A major highlight this August for the bacteriophage community was the biannual International Bacteriophage meeting at Evergreen State College, Olympia. This year marked the 24th meeting hosted by Dr. Betty Kutter that is most likely an accomplishment achieved by very few scientists! Although travel restrictions meant that most non-U.S. citizens were unable to travel to the United States, and even internal travel was difficult, the conference was hosted as a hybrid meeting and speaking as a virtual attender, it was a joy to attend. We are really pleased in this issue that Yuval Mulla, a postdoctoral scientist from the University of Cologne, and a team of excellent PhD students from across the world assembled to write an insightful overview of this meeting with key highlights from their perspectives as young researchers embarking on a career in phage biology.
Our inPhocus series of articles again has been very well received and is also particularly useful in current times, where travel is limited. Thus we bring you articles from across the world, written by scientists with strong associations with the countries they are writing about, to provide a real insider's view of the phage research landscape in different geographies.
The inPhocus article of this September 2021 PHAGE issue highlights an awareness that we have merely scratched the surface of global phage diversity, and phages have only been well characterized from a very few corners of the world. This motivated our group of academics from the Universities of Leicester, Copenhagen, Asian Institute of Medicine, Science and Technology (AIMST) Malaysia, and the Los Andes University, Bogota, Colombia, to join forces and start to collect and catalogue phages associated with extremely diverse environments, that of tropical rainforests. This consortia is discussed alongside other phage research that is occurring in Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries. In these locations, an interest and activity in bacteriophage therapy is steadily increasing, largely motivated by problems with antibiotic resistance compounded by practices in agriculture. We hope that you will enjoy the insights into major research here that were penned by our insiders from Malaysia.
We are really pleased in this issue to bring you five stimulating original research articles, one of which is a phage introduction that links to our InPhocus as it is from Malaysia and introduces study by Liu Jian et al., from the University of Putra, KL, Malaysia, on a new phage that targets the serious rice pathogen Xanthomonas oryzae.
As bacteriophages are getting closer to being used in therapeutic settings, it is important that developments in the practical research of preparing phages for use in humans and animals continue, as large-scale animal experiments or clinical trials are often limited by having high concentrations of phages products that are not contaminated with bacterial debris. The article by Michalik-Provasek, Jordyn et al., from Texas A+M, USA, describes a novel method to remove endotoxin from Klebsiella phage preparations.
The article by Addablah, Ameyo from Institut Pasteur de Côte d'Ivoire takes us to another geographical area that has seen little phage sampling and highlights to us the potential novelty of searching for new specific-lineage viruses in the Côte d'Ivoire.
The next article is written by Gustavo Di Lallo et al., an Italian team from the University of Roma Tor dell Ricerca Scientifica, where one of which has a novel hyaluronidase catalytic domain that they have modeled. Such phages may be particularly useful within a biofilm context as they may be better at degrading the biofilm.
Continuing with our theme of biofilms, the next article by Vijaya Lakshmi Degati and team from Yogi Vemann University, Kadapa, India, and the University of Hyderabad, India, describes a very useful set of approaches to examine the efficacy of phages to target biofilms and highlights the importance of phages to be able to target pathogens within biofilms that are associated with burn wounds.
We hope that you enjoy this issue; our December issue will focus on all aspects of phage informatics and machine learning, so if you or colleagues feel like contributing to this that promises to be an excellent set of articles to date, please get in touch.