Ten quick tips for classifying unknown bacteriophage

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Date
2026-06-01
Authors
Bastiaanssen, Fabian T.S.
Hill, Colin
Shkoporov, Andrey N.
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Public Library of Science
Published Version
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1014403
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Abstract
In microbiome research, bacteriophages (phages) are gaining increased attention for their roles as important ecological actors, as vehicles of horizontal gene transfer, and as “phagebiotics”—potential tools for precision microbiome manipulation: phage cocktails to suppress specific pathogens/pathobionts, “virome transplants” to restore microbiome diversity and functionality, phage vectors for delivery of CRISPR-Cas for microbiome editing. Once referred to as “viral dark matter” [1,2] of the microbiome, complex populations of bacteriophages are becoming easier to sequence and identify thanks to recent advances in high throughput virome sequencing and phage bioinformatics.
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Keywords
Bacteriophage , Virus , Microbiome , [Microbiology] , [APCMicrobiome]
Citation
Bastiaanssen, F T S, Hill, C & Shkoporov, A N 2026, 'Ten quick tips for classifying unknown bacteriophage', PLOS Computational Biology, vol. 22, no. 6, e1014403, pp. 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1014403
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https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105043672312
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https://hdl.handle.net/10468/19055
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APC Microbiome Ireland
School of Microbiology
Copyright
© 2026, Bastiaanssen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.