🔬 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, authored by Ry Young. 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 2001, 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.

Phage biologists are accustomed to being treated as relics, hoary apostles of a classical discipline pedagogically useful but past its prime. It is thus heartening to see the burgeoning interest in bacteriophage at all levels and from so many different perspectives. Of course, there are legions of protein biochemists biochemists who suddenly have to titer M13 to monitor the enrichment cycles of their phage display libraries. Even a purely methodological interest makes them stakeholders, however marginally, in phage biology. More impressive is the wave of other scientists who have come to phage as an active research field in the pursuit of seemingly unrelated goals. Suddenly the virulence of otherwise harmless bacteria turns out to be due to pathogenicity islands, which turn out to be prophages. Indeed, phage don't just carry virulence characteristics but in fact, suddenly, it develops that major diseases like cholera and enterohemorrhagic diarrhea are fundamentally phage-borne diseases, that in a sense the bacteria are victims as much as the human hosts. Suddenly, understanding pathogenesis requires understanding the inheritance, organization and expression of phage genes. Mirabile dictu, suddenly phage ecology is discovered to have been ignored; we know more about kangaroo rats than about the "where"'s, "when"'s and "how many"'s of phage populations. We don't know where these disease-factor phages are, how they are transmitted, how they change, what makes them tick. Until study sections wake up to this, clearly our ability to analyze, understand, and predict the emergence of new infectious disease is limited.

It is not just molecular pathogenicists and epidemiologists who are scurrying for their dusty phage texts; now it's the drug companies and clinicians who have the bug as the "new" concept of phage therapy is making news and attracting investors. Ironically, there is little known about what is available to attack various pathogens, and few people have actually done phage hunts. Thus decades-old phage collections assembled in Stalin's Caucasus by contemporaries of Lysenko are now attracting U.S. government research funding.

All of this serves to bring the word phage back into play in public and general scientific discourse, which is good. It's also the best of times since the Golden Age for phage biology proper. Through the dogged efforts of a few people interested in phage per se and also, pari passu, as a result of the sequencing of so many bacterial genomes that contain multiple prophages, suddenly we have a phage genomics. Suddenly phage evolution turns out to be stunningly inventive and articulated. The momentum in phage biology extends beyond primary structure to tertiary and quaternary structure: suddenly self-assembly of phage virions has been revealed at the atomic level by focusing modern x-ray crystallography on genetically tractable bacteriophage. Suddenly, through Crystallography and high-resolution cryo-electron microscopy, we have a crisp picture of the operation of a phage injection system, geared by both RNA and protein components. The best of times.

But it is also the worst of times. Few students and post-docs are being trained in the classical traditions of phage biology. Classical phage systems are being depopulated through super-annuation; you can count the combined number of P1, ϕX174, and T5 labs on one hand and have fingers left over. Almost no grant proposals are being written on phage systems. In the early '90s I served on one of the NIH study sections that traditionally supported phage biology. The panel always had several phage people, as well as individuals who had been trained in the phage biology tradition. Now that same study section has about a third as many R01's to consider, the proportion of phage grants is even less, and the number of phage biologists on the panel is now exactly one.

And now comes the pitch. The professional association of phage biologists is under siege. Division M of ASM has been placed on probationary status because our membership has fallen below the minimum 150, out of 19,000 total members. We can no longer vote in the ASM council. To use an analogy very familiar to Texans, it is like being moved to the isolation chamber shortly before execution. As the 2000–1 chair, I am appealing to the phage community to help redress the situation. We need to recruit for Division M. We need past members who have let their dues lapse to renew their memberships. We need our colleagues who are doing phage biology to join ASM and select Division M as their primary division. We need to enroll graduate students as student members, to look to the future of the Division.

Division M has a lot to offer. Being a small division is not all bad; smallness means we can be cohesive and organized. Despite being less than 1% of the membership, we have influence at the top. For example, this year's General Meeting is chaired by Lucia Rothman-Denes of Division M. All this means is that new members get to be part of a small and influential group and can make an impact immediately; just come to our Division meeting at Orlando this year and see!

If you are interested in joining ASM and Division M, please check out the ASM website at https://asm.org. Remember, it's the new Age of Phage. Get with the in-crowd before it becomes cool to do so.

Ry Young
Former Chair, Division M (Bacteriophage), ASM
Professor Emeritus, Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Texas A&M University