The new age of the phage.

The discovery of viruses that can devour bacteria, bacteriophages (phages), was in 1915. Phages are ubiquitous, outnumbering the organisms they devour, and genomically, morphologically, and ecologically diverse. They were critical in our development of molecular biology and biotechnology tools and have been used as therapeutics for over 100 years, primarily in Eastern Europe with thousands of patients from all over the world treated in Georgia.

Comparative transcriptomic analyses of diploid and tetraploid citrus reveal how ploidy level influences salt stress tolerance.

Introduction: Citrus is an important fruit crop for human health. The sensitivity of citrus trees to a wide range of abiotic stresses is a major challenge for their overall growth and productivity. Among these abiotic stresses, salinity results in a significant loss of global citrus yield.

Phase 2 Clinical Trial of VGT-309 for Intraoperative Molecular Imaging During Pulmonary Resection.

Background: Advances in intraoperative molecular imaging (IMI) may improve surgical outcomes when resecting tumors in the lung. A single-center trial was conducted using VGT-309, a cathepsin-targeted near-infrared imaging agent that causes lung nodules to fluoresce during surgical resection. The end point of this phase 2 study was to evaluate the frequency that IMI with VGT-309 resulted in a clinically significant event (CSE): localization of pulmonary nodules, discovery of unsuspected additional cancers, or identification of positive margins.

Decoding huge phage diversity: a taxonomic classification of Lak megaphages.

High-throughput sequencing for uncultivated viruses has accelerated the understanding of global viral diversity and uncovered viral genomes substantially larger than any that have so far been cultured. Notably, the Lak phages are an enigmatic group of viruses that present some of the largest known phage genomes identified in human and animal microbiomes, and are dissimilar to any cultivated viruses. Despite the wealth of viral diversity that exists within sequencing datasets, uncultivated viruses have rarely been used for taxonomic classification.