A tool to identify suitable phage candidates for phage therapy. “Sphae: an automated toolkit for predicting phage therapy candidates from sequencing data“
Abstract: The authors say “We developed Sphae, an automated bioinformatics pipeline designed to streamline the therapeutic potential of a phage in under 10 minutes. Using Snakemake workflow manager, Sphae integrates tools for quality control, assembly, genome assessment, and annotation tailored specifically for phage biology. Sphae automates the detection of key genomic markers, including virulence factors, antimicrobial resistance genes, and lysogeny indicators such as integrase, recombinase, and transposase, which could preclude therapeutic use. Among the 65 phage sequences analyzed, 28 showed therapeutic potential, 8 failed due to low sequencing depth, 22 contained prophage or virulent markers, and 23 had multiple phage genomes. This workflow produces a report to assess phage safety and therapy suitability quickly. Sphae is scalable and portable, facilitating efficient deployment across most high-performance computing and cloud platforms, accelerating the genomic evaluation process.”
Read here: https://academic.oup.com/bioinformaticsadvances/article/5/1/vbaf004/7959522?login=false
