🔬 Phage Takes

Bacteriophage Ecology Group News, or BEG News, was published mostly quarterly as an online newsletter for a total of 26 issues, starting July 1, 1999 and continuing through December 31, 2007. As follows is a reprint of the editorial from the newsletter. Also included in issues were lists of new members to the Bacteriophage Ecology Group, an introduction to new website features, a list of upcoming meetings, phage images found on the web (remember, this was 1999, so effectively pre-Google), etc., but most of all, a listing of new phage ecology-related publications. The newsletter was modelled after T4 News, which was a printed newsletter distributed earlier in the 1990s. The newsletter's successors are the ongoing Phage.org website, phage-therapy.org, and the Bacteriophage Ecology Group Facebook page.

The Bacteriophage Ecology Group (BEG) was born during the Summer of 1995 at the biannual Population Biology of Microorganisms Gordon Conference. The original group consisted of myself (Steve Abedon) plus a number of graduate students and post-docs including Brendan Bohannan, Greg Krukonis, Sharon Messenger, John Mittler, Tom Palys, and Ing-Nang Wang. At that moment I was in transition from a somewhat unsuccessful post-doc at the University of Pennsylvania (studying AIDS immunology of all things) to a tenure-track position in the department of Microbiology at The Ohio State University. Also at the time, I had a vague idea that service toward the profession counted for something, and that taking on a project such as BEG could contribute toward my college's service expectations.

Of course, as with all reasonably OK ideas, this one had its genesis long before the Summer of 1995. In fact, BEG's roots may be found in two locales. First, there is the obvious precedent of Max Delbrück's Phage Group as a means of motivating camaraderie among researchers and to promote outstanding phage research ("Phage Group" → "Bacteriophage Ecology Group," get it?). Second, by working with mentors highly influenced by the phage group--Harris Bernstein, the man who (by some tangled turn of logic that I don't fully understand) gave his mother's "name" to the amber mutation (amber is the English translation of the German word "bernstein"), was my Ph.D. advisor and John Spizizen, Emory Ellis' first post-doc, was both my department head and on my Ph.D. committee--I found myself immersed in bacteriophagy but nevertheless isolated from bacteriophage ecologists. This isolation was perhaps more one of attitude than of geography since a mere one mile south of the Bernstein laboratory there were not one but two laboratories actively engaged in bacteriophage ecology research: Conrad Istock's group with their ecology of bacteriophages in soil and Chuck Gerba's applied bacteriophage ecology. As far as I am aware, none of us were extensively talking with each other! This travesty, combined with my ongoing frustration, during the late 1980s, early 1990s as I attempted to proselytize the relevance of ecology to molecular geneticists (my supposed Ph.D. area of concentration), resulted in an observation that would eventually become BEG: Bacteriophage ecologists seem to interact with just about anyone but other bacteriophage ecologists. The surprisingly large concentration of bacteriophage ecologists at the 1995 Gordon conference made me realize that not only should this sad situation change, but that it could.

Additionally, in the simpler systems of biology, it should be possible for the proximate causation people (e.g., molecular biologists, physiologists, and biochemists) to talk to the ultimate causation people (ecologists and evolutionists), and vice versa, and there aren't too many biological systems that are much simpler than bacteriophages. Thus, my agenda is both broader and more ambitious than just the organization and development of bacteriophage ecology: I additionally hope to merge bacteriophagy into a coherent whole. Or, more precisely, remerge these two camps since, in fact, the roots of bacteriophagy can be found in an organismal biology that embodied a concern for both philosophies (see, for example, the translation of Félix d'Hérelle, 1917, below).

BEG, from the start, was a child of the internet. BEG began with e-mail but by July of 1996 consisted of a web site. The bulk of the work involved in getting this web site into its current form began in the following months as a catharsis aimed at getting me past the dual crises of my mother's death (as well as both of her parents, my grandparents) and my ongoing inability to complete the set up of my laboratory (the most humorous delay involved the loss of my centrifuge during its shipment when a box containing a motorcycle apparently fell upon it). Part of this development included putting on line my collection of bacteriophage ecology references that I had been collecting and assembling since my graduate-school days. We are now up to 2344 references in this bibliography! Milestones in the further development of the BEG site included the incorporation of a search engine for these references (late Summer, 1998) and my obtaining the www.phage.org URL (ditto). These two events are correlated since it was my need to run the search engine on a Windows-based machine that forced me off of our (Unix) campus web server (now used as a mirror site) and it was my frustration employing an IP address for this new site, rather than an URL (plus my dislike of long URLs, e.g., www.mansfield.ohio-state.edu/~sabedon/), that motivated me to purchase www.phage.org. Right from that start BEG has also proudly emphasized bacteriophage ecologists and currently our membership consists of 40 individuals. My guess is that this represents about half of the world's bacteriophage ecologists. Where/who are the rest of you?

If creating a web presence for bacteriophage ecology represented phase II of BEG, then here allow me to introduce phase III: Bacteriophage Ecology Group News. BEG News represents a continuation of our efforts to forge bacteriophage ecology (indeed, all of bacteriophagy) into a cohesive discipline. My hope is to publish BEG News quarterly, as a single web page, with issues put to rest with whatever I have written or received as of July 1, October 1, January 1, or April 1. I envisage BEG News as a means of introducing BEG members to new members; to publicize newly published research, newly discovered links, and new features found on the BEG site; to remind people of upcoming meetings, to advertise (for free, of course) job positions available as well as job positions wanted; etc... Most important, though, is to foster communication between all of us. Toward that latter end, I would like to highly encourage the submission of material for publication in BEG News. For example, we all would like to hear of any developments that are relevant to phage ecology and those of you that are closest to these developments should consider writing up short articles. We additionally would appreciate the submission of notes on relevant bacteriophage ecology research that, for whatever reason, may not be published elsewhere or in a timely fashion. In other words, people, lets start talking to each other!

BEG News will be posted as it is drafted and suggestions as well editorial comments are welcome from all. Any material not completed by the quarterly deadlines will be scheduled for tentative publication in the subsequent issue. As usual, send any materials to me at abedon.1@osu.edu (microdude@osu.edu works just as well). Please send all submissions as Microsoft Word documents if possible (I'll let you know if I have trouble converting any other document formats), and in English. I anxiously look forward to everybody's participation.