Bacteriophage Lab of Institut Pasteur

First post of 2026 for the BBH and it's a good one. This week, one of our PhD candidates, Caroline Henrot, took a big step in her journey by submitting her thesis document 🎉

Stay tuned for more news on her and her work, performed in collaboration with @inrae-france.bsky.social, throughout the year!

🚨New paper alert🚨

We were very pleased to see the publication of this work, product of our collaboration with the fine folks at @helmholtzmunich.bsky.social and @tum.de

That's a wrap on 2025 from the BBH lab!!!

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Last friday one of our lab's Postdocs, Nandita Sharma, presented her "Work in progress" talk at @pasteur.fr

Her results deal with the role of bacterial competition in the microbiota and the factors at play determining its outcome. Really cool stuff that we'll be sharing in the near future

THIS WAS GREAT FUN!! The team was watching last night and we really enjoyed getting to be a part of it

Thanks to the production team for highlighting the BBH lab work, among other @pasteur.fr groups

If you missed it last night, no worries, you can check it out here

www.france.tv/documentaire...

We mentioned this a while back, so we thought we'd show you another photo from that day, taken from a different angle 😎

This documentary, featuring the boss, will premiere TONIGHT!!! at 21h in France 5

www.francetvpro.fr/contenu-de-p...

www.francetelevisions.fr/et-vous/notr...

We were at the "Phages in Nancy" meeting last week and had a very fun time!

You can read all about it on this tread 🧵

#phagesky

Thanks a lot to the organizers for a great meeting !!

See you all next year in Toulouse 😎

We mentioned that we had 5 posters, right?

Well, we saved this one for last because Ngoc-Minh-Chau Nguyen rocked the house and ended up leaving with a prize!!! 🏆

She was VERY lively while presenting her results so we were glad to see her work be recognized by the jury

bsky.app/profile/phag...

Eventually things got competitive, as we tried to assemble the lego phage

It took us a while to put the whole thing together but look, we're not structural virologists, ok?

Of course, not everything was work, the team also participated in the fun time at the gala dinner

Although, as soon as the boss saw this little lego phage, we were back to the classroom 🤓

Caroline Henrot, presenting her talk "Prophage-inducing bacteriocins are frequent in Escherichia coli intestinal isolates" at the "Phages in Nancy" conference

Caroline Henrot, presenting her talk "Prophage-inducing bacteriocins are frequent in Escherichia coli intestinal isolates" at the "Phages in Nancy" conference

Nicolas Dufour, presenting his talk "Phagothérapie et infection pulmonaire : état des lieux et défis à relever" at the “Phages, MICI, Phagothérapie & Co” session, attached to the "Phages in Nancy" conference

Nicolas Dufour, presenting his talk "Phagothérapie et infection pulmonaire : état des lieux et défis à relever" at the “Phages, MICI, Phagothérapie & Co” session, attached to the "Phages in Nancy" conference

We were also able to present two talks, one by Caroline Henrot and another by Nicolas Dufour (in the “Phages, MICI, Phagothérapie & Co” session)

Fun fact: Caroline is actually from Nancy so she had to represent in her hometown and she did a very good job!!

Postdoc Nandita Sharma, presenting her poster "Interspecies competition between Citrobacter rodentium and Escherichia coli involves prophages" at the Phages in Nancy conference

Camille Sivelle, presenting her poster "Explorations on the mechanisms that bacteria deploy to survive a bacteriophage cocktail challenge" at the "Phages in Nancy" conference

Solene Ecomard presenting her poster "Structure-function relationships between bacteriophage tail fibers and host range: investigations with Nankovirus and Pakpunavirus infecting Pseudomonas aeruginosa" at the "Phages in Nancy" conference

Jose Alejandro Bohorquez presenting his poster "Interaction between bacteriophages and innate immunity as a determinant for the efficacy of phage therapy" at the "Phages in Nancy" conference

Our group was able to participate with 5 posters by members of our "gut" and "lung" teams

There was lively discussion around them and we were happy to share our results

You'll notice we only shared 4 posters in here ............ I wonder why🤔

We were glad to take part in the "Phages in Nancy" meeting last week, organized by site.phages.fr and hosted by Xavier Bellanger

We'll share some of the highlights in this thread 🧵

TL,DR We had a good time visiting some of our Portuguese colleagues this week, where we talked #phage and ran into some old and new faces

Our visit had it all: good science, good food and even an unexpected seismic drill

You can read all about it on this thread 🧵

This picture was taken right before The Boss' presentation at @gimmfoundation.bsky.social

We initially thought people were just a bit shy but, as it turned out, we were participating in the mandatory drills due to high seismic activity in the area 🤔

Safety first!!

We also visited Isabel Gordo's lab at @gimmfoundation.bsky.social (Oeiras) and ran into a familiar face, @martalourenco21.bsky.social former PhD candidate at our lab

We were happy to catch up with Luis @ltanoeiro.bsky.social, who's doing some of his PhD work over there under the supervision of Filipa and Jorge Vitor

bsky.app/profile/phag...

Last week, part of our team was busy at Bioisi (U. of Lisbon @cienciasulisboa.bsky.social ), talking all things #phage and #prophage with our collaborator Filipa Vale

We also got to share some good times!

Thanks a lot to Profs. Jorge Vitor and Filipa Vale, as well as our own Luis Tanoeiro @ltanoeiro.bsky.social for your hospitality

🔵⚪🔴 - Dans le cadre du groupe de travail ApprentiPhages (réseau Phages.fr), nous avons le plaisir de partager quelques vidéos pédagogiques sur nos virus favoris : www.canal-u.tv/chaines/phag...

D'autres thématiques phago-centrées à venir !

As part of the ApprentiPhages working group (Phages.fr network), we are pleased to share some educational videos about our favorite viruses: www.canal-u.tv/chaines/phag...

More phage-related topics coming soon!

Note: the videos are in French!”

TL;DR We had Microbiology department meeting this week @pasteur.fr !

Two full days of scientific discussion. If you wanna know what we talked about during those days, you can find it on this thread 🧵

Finally, our (former) M2 student Camille Sivelle was in charge of the lab's main presentation, showing her results regarding mechanisms for establishment of viral resistance in bacteria
She did a very good job at explaining a somewhat complicated experimental setup and results

Congrats, Camille!!

We got to finish the whole affair (on a high note, if we may say so ourselves) with two oral presentations

First up, the boss was showing off about the lab's work and its people

Gut team this ..... lung team that ....... but none of that would be possible without his leadership!

Alejandro, from our "lung" team and who clearly forgot to take a photo with his poster, got a very interesting phone call during his flash talk

He presented some of the work that was recently published by our group on the effect of innate immunity cell populations on phage therapy

We started up with the postdocs, both of whom had flash talks and posters

Nandita Sharma from our "gut" team presented her results of competition between Citrobacter rodentium and E. coli

She'll also be showing this during a "work in progress" talk in early december so be on the lookout for that!

We had a blast at the Microbiology department days @pasteur.fr where we got to learn what other people in our department are working on 🤓

The group also got to show some of our work to the whole department ✌️

This week we're saying "bon voyage" to one of our PhD students (Quentin), who'll be leaving us for a few months, and an M2 student (Laura), who's finishing her internship

Good excuse to spend some quality time with the whole team outside the lab 😎

Thanks for the hard work!! You'll be missed

Notably, ΦX174’s genome is tiny (5-6kb) and even this was challenging. Out of 300 generated genomes, 16 were functional and only few of them outperformed WT

For us, escalation to higher life forms seems a ways from today, even for a rapidly moving field (beyond considerable ethical implications)

❓ - New viruses (EVO), able to overcome ΦX174-resistance emerged after multiple passages of a GLM-phage cocktail.

The EVO genomes contained elements from GLM-phages, though the sequence itself was not GLM-generated.

So likely mixing GLM design with old-fashioned recombination would be best?