Dr. Sabrina Green: Phages and Phage Discovery

The Bioinformatics and Beyond Podcast

Dr. Sabrina Green introduces the concepts of phages and phage therapy. She describes what phages are and gives us a bit of history on phage therapy, describing reasons why antibiotics were widely adopted despite phages being discovered first. She also discusses why phages have become so important in the light of emerging antibiotic resistant pathogens. Dr. Green explains the mechanisms of how phages work and how these mechanisms lend themselves well to, for instance, scaling to different types of infections and getting cleared from a person’s system. Finally, we discuss how phages are discovered, such as through evolving phages and engineering phages. We learn about a specific paper Dr. Green authored involving finding novel phages from bird droppings. Finally, we discuss potential areas for bioinformatics contributions in the field of phages. Papers referenced include https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/phage.2020.0007 and https://mbio.asm.org/content/12/1/e03474-20