Inspiration
About 3 years ago, I was on the bus doing one of my favorite things in the world: reading. The book is called "The body, a guide for occupants" by Bill Bryson, and it mentioned the fact that we are running out of antibiotics. Bacteria keep evolving to be resistant to antibiotics, and new antibiotics are very limited (partially because pharmaceuticals companies don't invest as much in antibiotics research, since it's a 7-day, not a chronic-disease drugs). The projection is grim. I did not have extensive expertise in microbiology, but I since then tried to go to seminars in virology, out of pure curiosity. This project is one of my chances to tackle the problem of antibiotics-resistance.
I was fortunate to be able to invite enough of my colleagues and friends throughout all the schools I have been to, whose talents and work ethics are unmatched. We got a team of PhD students and postdocs in bioinformatics and computer science. A few of us never heard of phages before. But, together, we walked into this hackathon with an open mind and learned what phage is and why it may be our one saving grace against in the crisis of antibiotics resistance.
Here, we test out the idea that the interaction between phage and bacteria is sufficiently encoded in their DNA, i.e., we can sufficiently predict whether a phage can infect a bacteria by simply looking at the DNA sequences of the phage and bacteria in question. Be our guest!
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