Penn State Schuylkill Phages

In Spring 2023, several new phage hunters joined the ranks of the project as part of their Honors projects. Ayanna Grant, Marshaya Tucker, Mackenzie Illyes & Morgan Kleckner all performed phage research as part of lab this semester. Multiple phages were found with the group adding to the phage family. Students presented their work at our yearly Sustainable Symposium on April 28, 2023. Congratulations to the students on their hard work.

Information about their work can be found at our Symposium website.

From our original Honors Phage Students, Scarlet Tejada Rodriguez applied for and received a Student Engagement Network grant to continue her work with phages. In her project, she hopes to obtain more phages and then work to have them further analyzed. Some of her project design aspects include obtaining new soil samples and testing different methods for obtaining phages. Once more phages have been discovered on her plates, she will purify them for genetic sequencing to determine if new phages have been found. She is also looking to determine if these phages have the ability to infect bacteria beyond their original host as part of host range determination.

Please congratulate Scarlet on her grant and wish her luck in finding new phages.

In spring 2022, PS Schuylkill Phages was happy to host 4 new phage students. As part of their Honors Option Projects, these students worked to discover phages. In trying to adjust protocols for the Schuylkill environment and available equipment, they worked a lot to find phage. Some students were successful in our last days, which was a blessing and a curse, for our ability to follow the phage decreased a lot. However, it gave us some great lessons for what to do and not do on our campus. All of them presented at this year’s Sustainable Microbiology Symposium and you can learn more about their projects here.

Thanks to our first true phage students:

• Scarlet Tejada Rodriguez
• Juliana Akissi Ndjore
• Karandhir Singh Flora
• Kyla Valerie Carlos Guillermo

Congratulations to Adam T., our current phage student, who presented about some of his bioinformatics work and the importance of phage therapy. Also, a big round of applause and congratulations to all of yesterday’s participants. We had over 30 students present on their work in microbiology.

If you missed the symposium, you can check out the students and their presentations on the symposium website and through the following Zoom recordings.

Morning

Afternoon

We hope that you are able to join us next year. Good luck to all of our students.

The COVID19 pandemic has continued to wreck havoc on research, including the work performed by students in our microbiology classes. This year, we do have 1 student working on a phage protein function presentation. Join us as this student presents at this year’s symposium as part of the Sustainable Microbiology Symposium experience on April 29 at 10:35-12 via Zoom.

Happy Antibiotic Awareness Week 2020!!

What you say, you don’t know what Antibiotic Awareness Week is? Oh my goodness – we must correct that immediately. 

Sarcasm aside. We are in the middle of Antibiotic Awareness Week 2020. This is a week to consider how to safely use antibiotics. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) sponsors the U.S. Antibiotic Awareness Week, while the World Health Organization (WHO) promotes the World Antimicrobial Awareness Week.

From just that previous statement, you may be asking, “What is the difference between an antibiotic and an antimicrobial?” Antibiotic is a term directed towards medications that can be used to treat bacterial infections. Antimicrobial is a broader term that actually includes any of the medications (or compounds) used to fight against infection-causing agents, which can include antibiotics (more precisely called antibacterial agents) used to fight bacterial infections, antivirals which treat viral infections, antifungals used against infections caused by the eukaryotic fungi, and antiparasitics including antihelminthic drugs used against parasitic worms like roundworm or tapeworm. All of these compound categories are important for maintaining human health.

SO WHY ANTIMICROBIAL AWARENESS WEEK?

It is a time for those working with antimicrobials to reflect about how we can help the public understand how to use antimicrobials properly. It is also there to remind health professionals about when a patient might need an antimicrobial and it is not when a patient wants one. I know that might sound harsh, but the issue is that we, as a society, have been abusing antimicrobials since they have widely available. In this year of a pandemic caused by a virus, it is an important thing to understand that antibiotics do not treat viruses.

Right now, we need to make sure that it is not just a cold or flu or even coronavirus that is making us sick. We do not have treatments for these diseases, so using an antimicrobial against them would be futile. We need to know if we have a bacterial or viral infection before moving towards treatment. In many healthy individuals, the immune system will catch up and fight the infection. There are tests in the pipeline that can help speed up these diagnoses, as we have seen happen with COVID-19. We need to use the right tool for the job, which CDC so rightly portrays in their Antibiotic Smart campaign.

Antibiotic resistance today does have another option, which is phage therapy. Phage therapy is the use of bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, to treat the infection. One benefit is that these bacteriophages are tailored to individual infections, so that it will treat that organism actually infecting the person. Phage therapy has a long history, for it was the direction medical treatment was going before antibiotics became widespread and easily producible. The Soviet Union continued work throughout the decades and the United States is now back in the game. Actually, the work of phage projects, like SEA-PHAGES, is to find these organisms and characterize them. One of my favorite cases is of an optometrist who had a potentially deadly and highly resistant infection on his aorta be saved by phages. In fact, the SEA-PHAGES team and the students helping them helped saved a girl’s life. This young lady had a resistant infection and could have died, but the treatment worked. You can read more about it here. As time passes, hopefully these treatments will become more commonplace.

Be Antibiotic Smart! Only use the right medication for the right infection.

Happy Antibiotic Awareness Week! Happy Thanksgiving.

It’s really summer. Classes are over for the semester and students are hopefully at home recuperating from a whirlwind semester as our participant students prepare for medical school and applications. For the Schuylkill Phages, this means that we are in a bit of a lull. This lull doesn’t mean that we are really resting. Simply it means that the large group goals of the program are down for now. Research continues with certain students who are doing limited work during this pandemic.

Thanks to the COVID19 pandemic, our friends in the SEA-PHAGES program have actually cancelled their symposium for the year, which is really sad for students who have worked so hard during the academic year and cared for many a phage. However the importance of the work continues to be acknowledge. Recently, the phage master himself, Dr. Graham Hatfull at the University of Pittsburgh (aka Pitt) twitted about another media moment for phage therapy. Check out this story about young Isabelle who was saved through the use of bacteriophages that students at a participating university found. It truly is amazing and a great case for the research and sustainability.

The number of posts for summer will be limited, but we hope you tune back in for fall when the CDC will be hosting its annual U.S. Antibiotic Awareness Week, which coincides with other antibiotic awareness campaigns globally and Schuylkill Small Worlds Tiny Earth Program will be spreading the word about antibiotic use and resistance.

In the meantime, if you are looking for other projects that are helpful to the planet, check out Penn State Schuylkill’s Sustainability page and the Schuylkill Small Worlds Tiny Earth Program another research group from Ms. Smith.

Happy Summer! Be safe. Stay healthy friends until we meet again.

This year we were lucky enough to have 3 students from the Senior Class participate in learning about annotations throughout our semester with the Biochemistry II class. Though they did not get to have the full experience of phage discovery, learning something about virology along with the biochemistry of how these particles interact with other organisms was a unique opportunity. They worked on a bacteriophage genome for the semester and presented on it at the Penn State Schuylkill’s student research event.

You can check out all of the student research posters that occurred this semester. The annotation poster and presentation can be found at this link. Such great work by Michael Fleming, Eric Thompson, and James Abicunas, especially as their presentation focused on answering the questions and explaining their work.

As James, Mike, and Eric are graduating, we would like to take a moment to congratulate them on their achievements. Eric will be attending medical school in the fall. Best wishes for med school. James is in the process of applying to Physician Assistant (PA) programs. We wish him luck in the process. Mike is in the process of applying for medical school. We wish him luck with his process.

Congratulations to all the Penn State Schuylkill Graduating Seniors. Congratulations to all Penn State Graduates of the Class of 2020. You sure had a memorable year.

Bacteriophages are viruses. These viruses infect bacteria. Early scientists realized something was killing bacterial populations when they saw empty circles where the bacteria used to be on their petri dish samples. As such, scientists referred to these things as “bacteria eating” though they really do not eat bacteria at all. Kill, yes. Eat, no.

Check out this little blurb about bacteriophages from Nature.

https://www.nature.com/scitable/definition/bacteriophage-phage-293/ 

 

Welcome to Schuylkill Phages with MA Smith. This is the lab and research page about bacteriophage work here at the Penn State Schuylkill Campus.

The research work here focuses on finding, isolating, and characterizing bacteriophages found within natural soil. Each part of the process can have major challenges, but the potential benefits for the work are only getting starting. So we hope that we catch your interest on how to save the world with phages and learn something new along the way.