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Bacteriophage biologist and enthusiast. Associate Professor at the School of Biological Sciences, Monash University.

Jeremy Barr

This was a really challenging study where we attempted to characterise the biology of hundreds of temperate bacteriophages from the human gut - in the lab! This required anaerobic chambers to grow the gut bacteria, entirely new methods to induce and study the bacteriophages.

Im really excited for this work as it sets up a platform for us to study, characterise, and eventually determine what impacts temperate phages may have on the human gut microbiome. Future work may even allow us to manipulate the gut using these unique viruses.

A couple of highlights from the paper: - We find >100 new bacteriophages, many of which had never been isolated before and we're only 'discovered' through metagenomic sequencing approaches.

- We test ten diverse induction agents, and the most surprising one was that human cellular lysis products were strong inducers of temperate phages, suggestive of a mechanistic link between gastrointestinal cell lysis/inflammation and the gut virome.

- Temperate phage biology is HARD. We cant using traditional PFU plating (due to superinfection immunity), most isolates were poly-lysogens, equipment required is expensive and technically limiting, and the methods to study these phage had not been developed.

8mo

Very excited to share the latest work from our lab, which was published today in Nature! nature.com/articles/s41... PhD graduate and now post-doc Sofia Dahlman, along with co-senior author Sam Forster from The Hudson and other researchers from our lab and others.

8mo

Jeremy Barr

Isolation, engineering and ecology of temperate phages from the human gut Out now in Nature, by Sofia Dahlman, Jeremy Barr & colleagues. @jeremyjbarr.bsky.social #microsky www.nature.com/articles/s41...

8mo