🔬 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.

"Ecologists who are not thoroughly familiar with the organisms involved risk wasting a great deal of time." — Nelson G. Hairston, Sr.

For years now I've straddled the divide between the bacteriophage molecular and the bacteriophage ecological, never quite understanding the motivations of those who are dedicated to only one but not the other. The problem as I see it is one of using bacteriophages as model systems. Regardless of one's orientation, such an attitude is degrading to bacteriophages, as it is any individual who is objectified rather than treated as a whole. Take molecular types. With enormous success organisms have been reduced to their component parts, unless there is some economic incentive to do otherwise, with little regard for the subtleties of environmental interactions. The phage has a nucleic acid polymerase, the better to understand polymerases! But who cares where that phage uses that polymerase, nor how many phages it makes with it, much less why.

Purely ecology types are not much better. Sure phage populations do interesting things, and they are so simple that experimentation is far simpler than, say, setting up the Serengeti in the laboratory. Lions, and even zebras, are complex creatures, living in complex environments; so much easier it is to study a simple bacteriophage, infecting a simple bacterium, living together in a simple broth culture. However, simplicity can be deceiving. We only know that lions, zebras and the Serengeti are complex systems because we can see those complexities. As any molecular type could tell you, however, bacteriophages and bacteria (and even broth cultures as the ecology types might retort) can also be pretty darn complex. But it's easy to pretend otherwise because we can't see these complexities with our own eyes.

The solely molecular biology types have created a world in which phages are highly complex molecular model systems that have no ecology, while the solely ecological types have created a world in which phages are represented as simple ecological model systems. Obviously both views are quite misleading. And just as obvious, bacteriophage ecology is an irrelevant discipline, and increasingly so, unless it is based on a robust understanding of bacteriophage complexity. Only with such an understanding can one argue that the experimental manipulation of phages is justifiable because robust conclusions are possible only with systems that are understandable. But just because bacteriophages have that potential does not mean that the potential will be realized.

Ideally all bacteriophagologists would take a strong interest in both the molecular and the ecological. Minimally, bacteriophage ecologists should never lose sight of the molecular (and physiological) complexity of the organisms with which they work.