🔬 BEG News, the Final Quarterly Issue

Bacteriophage Ecology Group News (BEG News) was published mostly quarterly as an online newsletter for a total of 24 issues, July 1999 through April 2005. As follows is a reprint of the editorial from Volume 24. The newsletter’s successors are the ongoing Phage.org website, phage-therapy.org, and the Bacteriophage Ecology Group Facebook page.

When I began BEG News six years ago, for a July 1, 1999 issue, I had hoped that I might keep up the pace of putting out one issue a quarter for a year or two. But one issue turned into a dozen and now to two dozen, dutifully put out each quarter by yours truly. Not always on time, mind you, but not so late as to matter. The core of the newsletter came to be an editorial and a list of new phage ecology references. Between that and entering all of the new non-members into the BEG database (particularly as subscribers to BEG News via BioMed Central), I’ve devoted something approaching one full workweek to getting each issue out.

The original intent was to do this once a quarter to inspire me to update phage.org on a regular basis. Indeed, early issues of BEG News documented those updates. Ultimately, however, the result has been that I’ve spent far more time putting together BEG News than working on the rest of phage.org. Perhaps as a consequence, www.phage.org is no longer the Google number one site for a phage search (though I suspect the real reason we’re no longer number one is that they’ve rejiggered how they score sites). Please, everybody, for the sake of the Bacteriophage Ecology Group, place a link on your web sites that points to http://www.phage.org (rather than to http://www.mansfield.ohio-state.edu/~sabedon, which goes to the same place but is not the same thing). We’re still the phage ecology and bacteriophage ecololgy number one Google hit, however, so all is not yet lost. J

I would like to thank Hans Ackermann for his endless support as well as Steve McQuinn for his tireless devotion to computer rendering of the phage T4 virion. I would like to thank those of you, in addition to Hans, who contributed editorials to BEG News: Ry Young, Jim Karam, and Andrew Kropinski (and, of course,

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