It's 'Love at First Sight' for a new phage we recently isolated from a sample sent in by a citizen from their chicken coop. Pseudomonas phage KylieMinegg infects the pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which is commonly associated with chronic infections in cystic fibrosis patients.

KylieMinegg is predicted to be a virulent phage (88% probability based on phage.ai), so ideal for phage therapy. With a genome ~65,928 bp long, and slightly flattened capsid, KylieMinegg is a new member of the Pbunaviruses.

In our tests, KylieMinegg was capable of infecting and killing nine out of eleven clinical isolates of Pseudomonas aeruginosa from cystic fibrosis patients.

We are loving the name for this phage! Will we find more phages from these chicken samples that infect other pathogens? We should be so lucky.