A long comment on MetaFilter by someone doing their Ph.D. research on phage biology.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;metatalk.metafilter.com&#x2F;21925&#x2F;Interesting-Profiles#1012599" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;metatalk.metafilter.com&#x2F;21925&#x2F;Interesting-Profiles#10...</a><p>Excerpt:<p>&gt; <i>Over the last fifteen years or so, with the breakup of the Soviet Union and the exponentially growing crisis of antibiotic resistance, phage therapy is looking very exciting again. Unlike the ‘30s, we now have a decent understanding of phage biology as well as the infrastructure to keep phages cold until use, effective diagnostic tools, and most importantly, regulatory structures that shut out hucksters. The need is also dire, for example multi-drug resistant Staph infections kill more people in the United States than AIDS does.</i><p>&gt; <i>Basic phage biology has also been undergoing a resurgence as we discover just how important phages are to the global ecosystem, they are indeed the dominant organism on Earth outnumbering anything else by two orders of magnitude. Indeed, despite being just ~125 nm tall (check this out for scale), if one were to stack the 1031 phages on the planet end to end you would get a tower that would stand 200 million lightyears tall. Our oceans are remarkably free of cellular life and the reason is phages, as well as the other the viruses of microbes. For example the growth and death of algae blooms are centrally mediated by viral dynamics. Meta-genomics studies of the oceans pull out more predicted phage proteins than anything else without some fancy filtering, and even then they get a bunch. Phages are also teaching us a lot about the primordial origins of life, they are after all proto-cellular organisms.</i><p>&gt; <i>These days are exciting times to be interested in phages.</i>