Abstract
We hope that you had a good summer and we are very excited to share with you that we have received our first impact factor of 2.7 and a cite score of 3.3. We thank both you as writers, reviewers, and readers of PHAGE and our incredibly hard working behind the scenes folk at Mary Ann Liebert who have made this happen. This is a great achievement for a new journal and shows the appetite for the content all of us are generating and curating in PHAGE.
Hopefully you have caught at least one of the inspiring phage conferences that were hosted over this period in Paris in June for the World Congress on targeting phage therapy; in Tbilisi, Georgia, in July—for the Viruses of Microbes meeting; in Evergreen, Olympia, United States, in August for the International Phage meeting; or the Bacteriophage meeting in September in Oxford. All meetings had their own unique flavor, were beautifully organized and the sun shone!
Importantly there was a consistently high standard of presentations on all topics often motivated by a desire to use phages in therapy and a plethora of approaches to better understand phages, and phage behavior in complex systems. The meetings had a common positivity, as evidenced increasing clinical presence accompanied by methodological advances to allow better understanding of phages.
Anyway, as summer turns to autumn, we are happy to bring this September Edition of PHAGE to you. We are pleased to include a systematic review of how to manage urinary tract infections or UTIs. UTIs are a major global problem—and several research groups worldwide are working on different aspects of how to best use phage to treat these difficult infections and in doing so prevent bloodstream infections. In a great effort to bring together information on how effective this approach might be, Amany M. Al-Anany across Ontario, Canada, has examined the 55 studies that can be found in the literature.
This includes studies on multiple different species and studies from older literature and from articles that needed to be translated into English. These both serve as a very useful review in this topic and can form a blueprint to future reviews for different indications that are being investigated for phage therapy. We hope you enjoy the illustrative cartoon on the same topic, drawn by Ellie Jameson.
An unresolved question within phage therapy is whether it is better to use single phage preparations or cocktails of phage to treat diseases. Phage cocktails have the advantage of having a greater combined host range and thus probability that they will target the strain diversity within the bacterial species of interest. A key part of cocktail formulation is combining phages that work differently to minimize resistance from bacteria.
To assess how best to do this, Tomoyoshi Kaneko et al. from Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, robustly examined the lytic “timings” of 28 Escherichia coli phages and related this to their physiological properties. They show how lytic onset and duration are more similar when phages are similar in other ways. This provides data to support the idea to the utility of combining different phages that will lyse bacteria in different ways and at different time points.
Several speakers at the meetings mentioned above this summer highlighted the treasure trove of compounds found associated with phages and the benefits of learning from how they can kill their bacterial hosts. Cedric Woudstra et al., from the University of Copenhagen, have examined the talocins from phages as one such approach. Such phage tail-like proteins are produced by multiple bacteria to kill neighboring bacterial strains. They used some techniques developed for other purposes to successfully remove talocins from one phage type but not another. Such approaches may prove useful in the fight against antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and where phage replication is not desired.
We have also a Genome Introduction for you: which was led by Janet Yakubu Nale from Scotland's Rural College in Inverness and introduces to you phages UP19 and UP30. These phages have come on a long journey to get to you! They were isolated by participants of the Phages for Global Health workshop in Uganda in 2017, they were then brought back to Leicester and worked on further in both countries. Although these phages are genetically similar to known phages, they have useful phenotypic properties that make them a useful addition to target AMR E. coli.
We hope you enjoy reading this issue, with very best of wishes,
Martha Clokie and Thomas Sicheritz-Pontén