2026 International SPP 2330 Symposium Berlin

Session

Viral impact on microbial communities

OR

6 Oct 2026, 08:45

115. Temperate bacteriophage populations in the human gut: culturomics and experimental insights

Jeremy J. Barr (Monash University)

06/10/2026, 08:45

Viral impact on microbial communities

Talk from invited speaker

While often overlooked, the most abundant entity within the gut are the viruses that infect bacteria, called bacteriophages (phages). Large-scale metagenomic and data mining efforts have uncovered an expansive diversity of phages within the human gut. However, the functional understanding of phage-host interactions and their impacts within this complex ecosystem have been limited due to a lack...

101. No Escape – The ARTs of host takeover

Prof. Kai Thormann (Justus Liebig University Giessen)

06/10/2026, 09:15

Viral impact on microbial communities

Short-talk only

Lytic phages and their bacterial hosts pursue fundamentally opposing strategies: while phages aim to maximize their replication and progeny production, bacterial hosts seek to restrict or prevent phage propagation. To counteract host defense systems and make optimal use of host resources, many phages encode dedicated effector proteins. Upon infection, Shewanella phage Thanatos directly...

4. The Enemy of My Enemy Carries a Colicin: Engineering phages to redirect evolutionary trajectories of uropathogenic E. coli

Enea Maffei (ETH Zurich)

06/10/2026, 09:40

Viral impact on microbial communities

Short-talk only

Bacterial populations are shaped by antagonistic interactions, including phage predation and interbacterial competition mediated by toxins such as colicins. However, phages are usually used as natural bacterial killers rather than as programmable tools. Here, using uropathogenic Escherichia coli as a model, we show that broad-host-range phages can report phage-host interactions and constrain...

22. Targeted Antimicrobial Peptide Discovery and Phage Cocktail Development Against ESKAPE Pathogens

Torben Sanders

06/10/2026, 09:55

Viral impact on microbial communities

Short-talk only

Treatment options are being limited by the increasing threat of antimicrobial resistance among ESKAPE pathogens, with bacteriophages and phage-derived peptides being regarded as promising alternatives to conventional antibiotics.

Viral tagging, a culture-independent method, was used to identify wastewater-derived phages that selectively infect ESKAPE pathogens. After metagenomic assembly...

6. PhaDRiM - Phage induced Strain Replacement in Microbiomes

Marla Gaissmaier (Technical University of Munich)

06/10/2026, 10:15

Viral impact on microbial communities

Short-talk only

Within the last decades microbiome research became more and more relevant to the field of public health. It vastly contributed to understanding the pathogenesis of major human diseases but also generated knowledge on the emergence and spread of antibiotic resistances (ABR). Nevertheless, new insights always open up more questions. An important one is: How can we use this knowledge to...

116. Genetic perturbation of gut bacteria with engineered phage vectors and CRISPR-Cas systems

David Bikard (Institut Pasteur)

06/10/2026, 11:00

Viral impact on microbial communities

Talk from invited speaker

The crucial role of the gut microbiome in human health has driven a need to understand bacterial function within their complex native ecosystem. CRISPR-Cas screens have become a powerful method to systematically assess the importance of bacterial genes for growth in different conditions, and are being adapted to the study of gut bacteria. We performed screens in different E. coli strains...

90. Exploring virus dynamics in a Nanobdellati Co-culture system

Ms Sabine Schwarzer (Biology of Archaea and Viruses, Groningen Biomolecular Sciences and Biotechnology Institute, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands.)

06/10/2026, 11:30

Viral impact on microbial communities

Short-talk only

Archaea are infected by structurally diverse viruses that are important drivers of microbial evolution. However, archaeal virus infections are typically studied in binary host-virus systems, while the influence of additional microbial partners on infection dynamics remains poorly understood. The archaeal kingdom Nanobdellati (formerly DPANN) comprises ultra-small symbionts with reduced...

58. Viral Take-over of Host Photosynthetic Electron Transport: Investigating the role of Cyanophage-encoded Plastocyanin

Nicola Sekularac (Department of Microbiology, RPTU, Kaiserslautern, Germany)

06/10/2026, 11:45

Viral impact on microbial communities

Short-talk only

Marine picocyanobacteria are the most abundant primary producers in the world’s oceans. They are infected by specific viruses, cyanophages. So-called auxiliary metabolic genes (AMGs) encoded in the genome of cyanophages are believed to facilitate the takeover of the cyanobacterial cell by maintaining host metabolism during infection.[1] A commonly occurring AMG is the plastocyanin-like gene...

8. Metabolic reconstitution in the NAD+ battlefield: phages and bacteria in a molecular arms race

Ilya Osterman (European Molecular Biology Laboratory Hamburg)

06/10/2026, 12:05

Viral impact on microbial communities

Short-talk only

Bacteria defend against phage infection through a variety of antiphage defense systems. Many of these systems deplete cellular NAD+ in response to infection by cleaving it into nicotinamide and ADP-ribose or related metabolites. We previously showed that a substantial fraction of phages encode the NAD+ reconstitution pathway 1 (NARP1), which restores NAD+ from its degradation products and...

117. Understanding the role of bacterial anti-phage defences to inform phage therapy

Stineke van Houte (University of Exeter)

06/10/2026, 12:20

Viral impact on microbial communities

Talk from invited speaker

Bacteriophages are a major force in shaping microbial evolution and microbial community composition. In response, bacteria have evolved a wide repertoire of anti-phage defence systems. Most defence systems have been characterised in isolation and against only one or a few phages. As a result, we lack a quantitative and comparative understanding of defence range and the determinants of phage...