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

A previously unknown virus is showing up frequently in colorectal cancer patients, study finds Can viruses in the gut cause colorectal cancer Synopsis Gut virus in colorectal cancer patients: Scientists have uncovered a new virus within a common gut bacterium, Bacteroides fragilis. This virus appears more often in individuals diagnosed with colorectal cancer. This discovery offers a potential new way to understand the disease. Researchers are exploring if stool tests for these viruses could help assess cancer risk in the future. Gut virus in colorectal cancer patients : For years, scientists have known that the gut plays an important role in health and disease. In colorectal cancer, one bacterium in particular, Bacteroides fragilis, has repeatedly appeared in research, but there has always been a mystery: the same bacterium is also found in most healthy people. Colorectal Cancer Risk: Why Bacteroides fragilis Has Puzzled Scientists for Years Now, researchers from the University of Sout...

Subcommittee on Phage susceptibility testing Lytic bacteriophages, or phages, are viruses that infect and kill bacteria. Phage therapy is emerging as a promising adjuvant to traditional antimicrobials for combatting difficult-to-treat bacterial infections. However, implementation of phage-based treatments requires standardized methods for testing their efficacy to select the optimal therapeutic phages. To address this, EUCAST has established the EUCAST Phage Susceptibility Testing (PST) Subcommittee Remit of the PST Subcommittee : - Developing  standardized reference methods  to ensure uniform and reproducible  in vitro  phage susceptibility testing across laboratories worldwide, - Establishing  criteria for interpretation of PST results , providing clinicians and researchers with evidence-based guidelines to assess phage efficacy and monitor phage activity. - Promoting  quality assurance  by implementing stringent  quality control  measures ...

New study reveals a minimalist bacterial defense that disrupts viral assembly University of Toronto researchers have expanded our understanding of bacterial immunity with the discovery of a new protein that can both sense and counteract viral infections. Source: Erin Howe/University of Toronto Professors Michael Norris (left) and Karen Maxwell In the new study, published in  Nature , researchers from U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine describe how a single protein named Rip1 recognizes bacteriophages, the viruses that infect bacteria, and cause infected bacteria to die prematurely, thereby ending the chain of transmission. “There are a lot of parallels between our immune system and bacterial immune systems,” says Karen Maxwell, the study’s co-senior author and a professor of biochemistry at Temerty Medicine.   Her research is focused on understanding how bacteria protect themselves against phages and how phages overcome these defences, with the long-term goal of us...

Novel phage DNA modifications offer new hope against antibiotic-resistant superbugs Dr. Junzhou Wu (center) and colleagues demonstrate that natural DNA modifications in phages occur at a much higher rate than previously predicted. The new study not only improves the understanding of phage biology, but also revises the fundamental understanding of phage biology, opening up new avenues for discovering other novel phage DNA modification systems.-  Photo courtesy of SMART An international team of researchers has made a breakthrough discovery regarding the intricate defense systems of bacteriophages (phages) — viruses that can specifically target harmful bacteria without harming human cells and beneficial microbes. The researchers found a novel type of phage DNA modification, with the addition of up to three arabinose sugars, that could help protect phage DNA from damage and enable it to survive bacterial attacks. This knowledge could be leveraged to develop new, targeted phage treatmen...

Viruses Behave Totally Differently in Space and It Could Help Us Treat Superbugs on Earth Bacteria and viruses are locked in a slow motion battle aboard the ISS that looks nothing like life on the ground. The International Space Station photographed above the Earth from the space shuttle Atlantis in 2011. Credit: NASA Bacteriophages  — viruses that prey on bacteria — are nature’s tiniest predators. On Earth, their lives are shaped by an ordinary physics engine we rarely think about: gravity-driven mixing. Liquids circulate, nutrients move, microbes bump into one another, and phages stumble into susceptible cells. Take gravity away and you get a microbial world where particles drift,  convection  fades, and the odds of a productive collision change. Yet even in the near-weightlessness of the International Space Station (ISS), viruses called phages can still infect bacteria, a new  PLOS Biology  study reports . But microgravity seems to change the pace and rules o...