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Updated: Oct 7, 2026
Bacteriophage Effectiveness for Biocontrol of Foodborne Pathogens Evaluated via High-Throughput Settings
Published on: August 19, 2021
Quantitative phage-host interaction profiling supports the design of a broadly active phage cocktail against
Josep Garcia-Llorens1,2, Ignacio Samuel Gómez-Cano1, Jan Torres-Boncompte1
1Centro de Calidad Avícola y Alimentación Animal de la Comunidad Valenciana, (CECAV), Castellón, Spain.
Introduction:
Enterococcus faecalis is an opportunistic pathogen of One Health relevance and an important reservoir of antimicrobial resistance in poultry production systems. In this study, we generated a large-scale quantitative phage-host interaction dataset to support the rational design of phage cocktails targeting multidrug-resistant poultry-associated E. faecalis.
Methods:
Thirty-eight lytic phages were isolated from poultry farm samples, genomically characterized, and evaluated against 51 clinical poultry isolates using efficiency of plating as a quantitative measure of productive infectivity.
Results:
The complete phage collection achieved 94.12% cumulative strain coverage, while genomic relatedness showed only a moderate association with infectivity profiles, highlighting the need for functional screening. Computational optimization identified a six-phage cocktail, CKT6, which displayed broad in vitro activity against diverse strain backgrounds, reaching 92.16% coverage at MOI 1. Importantly, cocktail performance was not fully predictable from individual phage activity, as host-dependent synergistic and antagonistic effects were observed.
Discussion:
These findings support quantitative phage-host interaction profiling as a robust framework for reproducible and adaptive phage-cocktail design. Further validation under biofilm-associated, formulation-relevant and field-like poultry-production conditions will be required before practical application.
