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Related Experiment Video

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Phage Phenomics: Physiological Approaches to Characterize Novel Viral Proteins

Phage Phenomics: Physiological Approaches to Characterize Novel Viral Proteins

Published on: June 11, 2015

HostPhinder: A Phage Host Prediction Tool.

Julia Villarroel¹, Kortine Annina Kleinheinz², Vanessa Isabell Jurtz³

¹Center for Biological Sequence Analysis, Department of Systems Biology, Technical University of Denmark, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark. juliavi@cbs.dtu.dk.

|May 7, 2016

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Antibiotic resistance drives renewed interest in bacteriophages. HostPhinder, a new bioinformatics tool, accurately predicts bacterial hosts from phage genomes using genomic similarity, aiding phage therapy development.

Keywords:

genome k-mers prediction “host specificity”

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Interactome-Seq: A Protocol for Domainome Library Construction, Validation and Selection by Phage Display and Next Generation Sequencing

Interactome-Seq: A Protocol for Domainome Library Construction, Validation and Selection by Phage Display and Next Generation Sequencing

Published on: October 3, 2018

Area of Science:

Genomics
Bioinformatics
Microbiology

Background:

Rising antibiotic resistance necessitates alternative antibacterial strategies.
Bacteriophages (phages) offer a promising alternative to antibiotics.
Advancements in bioinformatics enable high-throughput phage characterization.

Purpose of the Study:

To introduce HostPhinder, a computational tool for predicting bacterial hosts of phages.
To leverage phage genome sequences for accurate host prediction.
To assess HostPhinder's performance against existing methods like BLAST.

Main Methods:

HostPhinder analyzes phage genome sequences to predict bacterial hosts.
It uses a reference database of 2196 phages with known hosts.
Genomic similarity is measured by the count of co-occurring k-mers.

Main Results:

HostPhinder achieved 81% accuracy in predicting host genus and 74% for host species on an independent evaluation set.
It outperformed BLAST in host prediction, especially for phages where both tools provided predictions.
Predictions for the INTESTI phage cocktail matched the advertised targets, validating the tool's efficacy.

Conclusions:

Genomic similarity is a reliable indicator of bacterial host relationships for most phages.
HostPhinder is an effective tool for predicting phage bacterial hosts, supporting phage therapy research.
The tool is accessible via a web service and Docker download.