Roadmap for Phage technologies

What are we trying to achieve and why? What is the problem we are trying to solve?

Establishing better informed strategies to isolate or choose relevant phages.

What are the scientific and technological challenges (knowledge gaps needing to be addressed)?

Establishing a better ecological and bioinformatic framework to inform isolation.
Better understanding of the bacterial structures that are receptors for phages.
Explore relevant/specific environments to isolate them: most phages are isolated from sewage, rivers or farms.
More work could be carried out on isolation procedures to not just enrich and thus find the common phages but to identify less common phages that could have better properties.
Establishing phage collections for all the major pathogens and main commensals especially those bacteria which harbour AMR plasmids. This will include numerically dominant anaerobes from the gut.
Biases associated with the key isolation steps, e.g., from sample handling, VLP extraction, nucleic acid extraction protocol & library preparation.

What approaches could/should be taken to address the research question?

Use of AI and machine learning with the increasing information on phage genomes to identify characteristics optimal for the use to which they may be put.

What else needs to be done before we can solve this need?

Larger accessible genome libraries.
Software adapted to use with phages many of which are AT rich.

Existing knowledge including successes and failures