A bacteriophage, also known informally as a phage, is a virus that infects and replicates within bacteria and archaea. The term was derived from "bacteria" and the Greek φαγεῖν, meaning "to devour". Bacteriophages are composed of proteins that encapsulate a DNA or RNA genome, and may have structures that are either simple or elaborate. Their genomes may encode as few as four genes and as many as hundreds of genes. Phages replicate within the bacterium following the injection of their genome into its cytoplasm.
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the National Academy of Medicine (NAM).
Salvador Edward Luria was an Italian microbiologist, later a naturalized U.S. citizen. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969, with Max Delbrück and Alfred Hershey, for their discoveries on the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses. Salvador Luria also showed that bacterial resistance to viruses (phages) is genetically inherited.
Marlene Belfort is an American biochemist known for her research on the factors that interrupt genes and proteins. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been admitted to the United States National Academy of Sciences.
A mycobacteriophage is a member of a group of bacteriophages known to have mycobacteria as host bacterial species. While originally isolated from the bacterial species Mycobacterium smegmatis and Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative agent of tuberculosis, more than 4,200 mycobacteriophage have since been isolated from various environmental and clinical sources. 2,042 have been completely sequenced. Mycobacteriophages have served as examples of viral lysogeny and of the divergent morphology and genetic arrangement characteristic of many phage types.
Allan McCulloch Campbell was an American microbiologist and geneticist and the Barbara Kimball Browning Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biology at Stanford University. His pioneering work on Lambda phage helped to advance molecular biology in the late 20th century. An important collaborator and member of his laboratory at Stanford University was biochemist Alice del Campillo Campbell, his wife.
Joan Elaine Argetsinger Steitz is Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is known for her discoveries involving RNA, including ground-breaking insights into how ribosomes interact with messenger RNA by complementary base pairing and that introns are spliced by small nuclear ribonucleic proteins (snRNPs), which occur in eukaryotes. In September 2018, Steitz won the Lasker-Koshland Award for Special Achievement in Medical Science. The Lasker award is often referred to as the 'American Nobel' because 87 of the former recipients have gone on to win Nobel prizes.
Stefan Ślopek (1 December 1914 in Skawa near Kraków – 22 August 1995, Wrocław was a Polish scientist specializing in clinical microbiology and immunology.
Graham Charles Walker is an American biologist, notable for his work explicating the structure and function of proteins involved in DNA repair and mutagenesis, with applications for cancer, and for understanding rhizobium (bacterial) functions that infect plants and mammals.
Peter S. Kim is an American scientist. He was president of Merck Research Laboratories (MRL) 2003–2013 and is currently Virginia & D.K. Ludwig Professor of Biochemistry at Stanford University, Institute Scholar at Stanford ChEM-H, and Lead Investigator of the Infectious Disease Initiative at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.
Shah Mohammad Faruque is a professor and the dean of the School of Environment and Life Sciences at Independent University Bangladesh (IUB). He is widely recognized for his research in Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium which causes the epidemic diarrhoeal disease Cholera. Among other positions, previously he was a professor at BRAC University; director of the Genomics Centre at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B), and formerly director of the Centre for Food and Water Borne Diseases in ICDDR,B. His areas of research interest include microbial genomics, bacteriophages, environmental microbiology, ecology, and evolution of bacterial pathogens, particularly those associated with waterborne and foodborne diseases. Faruque is primarily known for his work in genomics, epidemiology and ecology of the cholera pathogen, and its bacteriophages.
Mycobacterium virus L5 is a bacteriophage known to infect bacterial species of the genus Mycobacterium.
Armin Dale Kaiser was an American biochemist, molecular geneticist, molecular biologist and developmental biologist.
The Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department (CBD) is one of the seven departments within the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Now situated in the Gates-Hillman Center, CBD was established in 2007 as the Lane Center for Computational Biology by founding department head Robert F. Murphy. The establishment was supported by funding from Raymond J. Lane and Stephanie Lane, CBD officially became a department within the School of Computer Science in 2009. In November 2023, Carnegie Mellon named the department as the Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department, in recognition of the Lanes' significant investment in computational biology at CMU.
Mycobacterium virus Jeffabunny is a bacteriophage known to infect bacterial species of the genus Mycobacterium. It was discovered by Jeffrey Rubin in 2008 in a Howard Hughes Medical Institute funded lab as part of SEA-PHAGES. It was taken from surface soil in a planter, in the shade of a non-redwood tree at Merrill College found infecting, specifically, Mycobacterium smegmatis.
SEA-PHAGES stands for Science Education Alliance-Phage Hunters Advancing Genomics and Evolutionary Science; it was formerly called the National Genomics Research Initiative. This was the first initiative launched by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Science Education Alliance (SEA) by their director Tuajuanda C. Jordan in 2008 to improve the retention of Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students. SEA-PHAGES is a two-semester undergraduate research program administered by the University of Pittsburgh's Graham Hatfull's group and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Science Education Division. Students from over 100 universities nationwide engage in authentic individual research that includes a wet-bench laboratory and a bioinformatics component.
George Pearson Smith is an American biologist and Nobel laureate. He is a Curators' Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, US.
Karla Kirkegaard is the Violetta L. Horton Research Professor of genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She was the chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology from 2006 to 2010. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on virology.
Heather Hendrickson is a microbiologist and an Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. She previously worked at Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand. Her research is focussed on the evolution of bacterial cell shape, and the discovery of bacteriophages that can attack antibiotic-resistant bacteria and the bee disease American foulbrood.
Venigalla Basaveswara Rao is an Indian-American biochemist who is a professor of biology at the Catholic University of America. He serves as Director of the Bacteriophage Medical Research Center. In 2021, he was elected a Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology and the National Academy of Inventors.
