Talk:Bacteriophage

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dangers

"A famous example is the conversion of a harmless strain of Vibrio cholerae by a phage into a highly virulent one, which causes cholera. This is why temperate phages are not suitable for phage therapy." Such a STUPID SENTENCE : it's not because it could be dangerous that it's never going to be useful!! Looks very much like some antibiotic proselytism! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 144.85.179.216 (talk) 22:00, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Is there any word about the possible dangers of a) phage therapy and b) using the things with food? Is it possible that a bacteriophage would infect a human cell? _sd

- Bacteriophage is highly specialized to attack bacterial cell and they can't attach or attack human cell. There is a small danger that the phage code for a virulence factor and can increase the virulence of a bacteria. For exemple, the pathogenicity of some strains of Vibro cholerae (cholera)can be explain by the presence of prophage in their genome. This kind of phenomenon is possible only with temperate phages. But, there are some rules for the phages used in the food or therapy. These phages are extensively studied to verify the possible presence of these kind of virulence factor and some of the interesting phage are lytic (these phages don't have the possibility to integrate their DNA, then we avoid the lysogenic state). H. Deveau (August 26, 2006)

There are dangers, but they would be indirect. One danger of phage therapy is that it might be used instead of more appropriate and effective treatments. Another, relevant to the use of any chemical or virus or genetic engineering, is that the organisms may develop resstance. It is trivially easy in the laboratory to select bacteria that are rsistant to any given bacteriophage, and as H.Devoe mentions, the biology of such resistance is well-studied. The use on food would have similar problems. It is better to process meat so it does not contain Listeria than to treat the contamination. DGG 22:30, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

Movement

This sentance tells us that phages do not move of theirown accord; - As phage virions do not move, they must rely on random encounters with the right receptors when in solution (blood and lymphatic circulation)., however this sentence seems contradictory; - When an effective phage has been found it will seek out the bacteria and continue to kill bacteria of that type until they are all gone.

Can somebody please correct this? Parasite 08:05, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

a possible citation - http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/09/19/48hours/main522596.shtml

Link to 'Vidiian'

The link doesn't really have anything to do with bacteriophages, other than that those aliens suffer from a disease called "the phage". I've removed the link. CatBoris 14:16, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Prophage

Does anyone feel the prophage article warrants existence? It's very small and could easily be redirected here. Since this is the only 'parent' topic it relates to, I see no reason to have a separate article unless there is so much content on the subject that it can't be adequately covered here. Richard001 04:32, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Patent law and corporate motivation

I've removed the sentence that stated as a blunt fact that patent difficulty surrounding phages is the reason mainstream pharma companies are 'reluctant' to pursue the developments of phage therapies. The single quote supporting this assertion is from a doctor working at a company developing phage therapy -- hardly an unbiased source, and irrelevant to the scope of the article as a whole. palecur 06:26, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Further minor edit: Removed verbage about how phages are more 'accurate' and 'potent' than drug therapy, since there was no source offered beyond the bare assertion. Likewise the statements about side effects. palecur 02:03, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Question? What is going on with the development of bacteriophages for use in the USA for medical purposes? What is preventing this technology from being developed and brought to market? Is the technology not actually viable? Or are there other factors? ReasonableLogicalMan 13:20, 4 November 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Reasonablelogicalman (talk • contribs)

I have found an article in the german GEO that supports this fact - and it does make sense, doesn't it. Will re-add if no-one objects and add the correct citations. The article also suggests that because of the fact that early research was mainly conducted by the soviets, phage therapy was seen as "communist" and thus antibacterial treatment was preferred in the west. Besdomny (talk) 10:07, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

Go for it! §everal⇒|Times 03:08, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Phage Therapy

Seems like the last paragraph of "Phage Therapy" is an unscrupulous plug for a Georgian medical practice. Given that Georgia is not generally considered to be part of Europe, the statement that it is suggests someone might be trying to legitimatize this medical practice. The phrase "low cost" and the uncredited anecdote of healed westerners only makes the paragraph less believable and more like an advertisement. This paragraph might need to be removed, or significantly altered. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.227.231.227 (talk) 18:36, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, I boldly removed it, along with the associated external links. I left a small summary of the specific article, which is all that is possibly warranted here--and it still needs some NPOV sourcing. The problem of the accuracy and POV of the Phage therapy article remains to be addressed. As it was, anyone coming here wouldn't have realised that bacteriophage actually was a subject of scientific study, given the predominance of fringe material. DGG (talk) 22:44, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

The second and fifth articles of this section are still listed as "Citation Needed". When will this be resolved? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.194.48.50 (talk) 13:41, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

Quantity

$Insertformulahere$ "Talk of the Nation"/"Science Friday"/"Using "Phage" Viruses to Help Fight Infection" / April 4, 2008: There are estimated to be 10^32 of them. Kdammers (talk) 03:11, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Cite needed

I've removed the following as unreferenced:

"They are also found in drinking water and in some foods, including fermented vegetables and meats e.g. pickles, salami, where they serve the function of controlling any growth of bacteria."

Can someone find a cite for this, please, before restoring it to the article? -- The Anome (talk) 07:29, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

External links

I removed some links to individual research centers, companies, and similar. See WP:EL. Before re-adding, explain here. 02:00, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Potential danger to humans

I was reading in this blog about a potential food safety issue regarding phages infecting bacteria, and then giving the bacteria the gene to produce a toxin. Obviously, if the person gets this phage through a bad peice of meat, they are in trouble. Does anyone have further information in regards to the danger phages might pose to humans?Linkthewindow (talk) 11:34, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Envelope: no explanation

The words "enveloped" and "non-enveloped" are used in the chart but are not explained or linked to an appropriate reference that explains their meaning. MATThematical (talk) 22:55, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

See Virus or viral envelope. Graham Colm ^Talk 23:09, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Are bacteriophages affected by antiviral drugs?

Does anyone have any information about this seemingly important question/concern? DanaUllman^Talk 15:56, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't have any information, just an opinion. Most (probably >99% of) phages are in water, the oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, lochs, ponds, puddles and sewers. No doubt antiviral drugs end up these waters, mainly sewers, but at a concentration that is most unlikely to have any inhibitory effect on their replication. But, are you asking a more direct question; such as do antiviral drugs stop bacteriophages replicating? I don't think anyone has done the experiment—there is no published research on this to my knowledge. The anti-retrovirals are unlikely to have any effect since the known phages (well, at least the ones I know about) do not use reverse transcriptase. As for the DNA nucleoside analogues, such as aciclovir used to treat DNA virus infection, who knows—this might be an interesting research project. Graham Colm ^Talk 23:05, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanx for your consideration here. I am not that concerned about the phages in water, but the phages in our bodies. If they have beneficial effects in our bodies, I'm just wondering what effects the various antiviral drugs will have on them, akin to how antibiotics influence both "bad" and "good" bacterial growth and development. DanaUllman^Talk 01:12, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Not much. Antivirals tend to target virus interactions with eukaryotic cells rather than prokaryotic cells.©Geni 01:26, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Taxonomy

I've corrected the taxonomic table to make clear that only the first three families shown belong to the Order Caudovirales (see the Wikipedia article on Caudovirales). None of the other families are assigned to an Order, and this is reflected in their code in the Index of Viruses published by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, which in each such case begins with 00. See the Wikipedia article on International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, and for example, in the case of the Leviviridae, http://phene.cpmc.columbia.edu/Ictv/fs_leviv.htm. Richard Lugg (talk) 16:06, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

I think a bit more elucidation could help non-expert readers like me. I don't have enough certainty to make the edits, but I'd like to see two things:

1. Assuming it's correct, I'd like to see a clear statement that bacteriophages don't seem to form a clade (this seems to be implied by the table, but it would save naive readers a lot of time figuring this out). Maybe a link to [Virus Classification] would be helpful here
2. The previous commenter seems to imply that the reason higher-level classifications don't appear is that they aren't yet determined. If that's a correct interpretation, maybe it should be more clearly stated in the text. If it's incorrect (i.e. some of the highest levels are determined), that would also be useful to clarify. For example, the 'Nucleic acid' tab seems to indicate that Realm and Kingdom levels could be filled in, but I'm left unsure whether, for example, dsDNA bacteriophages are directly related to other dsDNA viruses or just a convergent evolution. Are they related, are they unrelated, or is this still unknown?

Urilarim (talk) 01:23, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

Bacteriophages in Marine Environments

The section about bacteriophages being very numerous in marine environments in correct and has been demonstrated multiple times. One report early in these studies is Breitbart, M, P Salamon, B Andresen, J Mahaffy, A Segall, D Mead, F Azam, F Rohwer (2002) Genomic analysis of uncultured marine viral communities. Proceedings of the National Academy USA. 99:14250-14255. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Clayspace273 (talk • contribs) 02:36, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

plural

The plural form phage seems to become more popular. I've added it to wikt:phage with references, maybe it should also be mentioned here. The second reference (a 1984 textbook) tries to make a semantic distinction, but I'm not sure if this is how it is used in practice.--88.73.44.100 (talk) 17:37, 9 April 2011 (UTC)

Another cultural reference

The plot of Michael Crichton's novel Swarm relies heavily on phages, their antibacterial actions, and how they might be made commerically. May I add this? Old_Wombat (talk) 09:20, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

Table

I've sorted the table, and reworded a few entries to make common traits more apparent. To allow full sorting the Nucleic acid and Morphology columns would have to be each split in two though (acid & shape, envelope & form). --Belg4mit (talk) 02:36, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

Another "Cultural Reference".

Michael Crichton's "Prey" deals with a number of aspects of the microbial world, with a phage that digests E.Coli being one of them. 58.167.91.92 (talk) 10:47, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

History

It is known that the Russian microbiologist Nikolay Gamaleya more in 1897 first observed the phenomenon of lysis of bacteria (anthrax bacillus) under the influence of transplantable agent. http://school188spb.narod.ru/vir_bak.htm http://o-med.ru/bakteriofag.php Vashot (talk) 17:59, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

Ernest Hanbury Hankin Reference

The first line in the "History" section reads: "In 1896, Ernest Hanbury Hankin reported that something in the waters of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India had marked antibacterial action against cholera and could pass through a very fine porcelain filter," with a citation needed tag. I tried to find some literature regarding it and found an article suggesting that the Hankin reference was not talking about a bacteriophage at all. Maybe it would be best to remove that line, or perhaps put it elsewhere with a mention that it's debated. Pandarsson (talk) 13:49, 9 July 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for this. This is quite helpful.

I think the abstract of the article you cite, Abedon et al. (2011), is misleading: Their Table 1 lists 30 articles between 1895 and 1917.

The 1915 article by Frederick Twort was the only one of those 30 to use the word "virus" in the title.

The word virus had appeared earlier in the literature at least by 1898.

However, the Wikipedia article on virus also mentions the 1917 article by Félix d'Herelle, reporting that "He accurately diluted a suspension of these viruses and discovered that the highest dilutions (lowest virus concentrations), rather than killing all the bacteria, formed discrete areas of dead organisms. Counting these areas and multiplying by the dilution factor allowed him to calculate the number of viruses in the original suspension." (as of 2016-07-08)

In addition to establishing that viruses were discrete particles and providing a method for counting their concentrations, this 1917 article by Félix d'Herelle introduced the term "bacteriophage".

However it's also clear to me that at least the first of the two 1896 articles by Hankin discussed "bactericidal action of waters of Jumna and Ganges on vibrio cholerae." An 1895 article by Frankland "On the behavior of the typhoid bacillus and the common Bacillus coli in drinking water" may have made similar observations; that's not clear from the article's title. I've requested that article on Interlibrary loan. When I have a chance to review it, I'll record here my interpretation of what Hankin did. My bottom line at the moment is that Abedon et al. are correct in the sense that Hankin did not establish the viral content the waters of the Ganges. However, he was one of the first if not the first to describe their bactericidal properties in a modern European language. (Further research would likely produce a reference in Sanskrit one or two thousand years old telling people to drink water from the Ganges to cure cholera!)

DavidMCEddy (talk) 15:46, 9 July 2016 (UTC)

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is a virus an "organism"?

User 199.212.251.15 claimed to add "a crutial fact about viruses", by displaying a link to virus as [[virus|organism]]. This is controversial: The Encyclopedia of Life says that "A virus is a microscopic organism". However, the Wikipedia article on organism claims that more common definitions insist that an organism must be capable of reproduction.

This article is not a place to take sides in that controversy. As of 2018-05-14 the word "organism" appears twice later in the text in ways that imply that a virus may be an organism but do not seem as confrontational.

This comment supports the reversion made by user:Natureium. DavidMCEddy (talk) 14:30, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

Regardless of one's views on a virus being an organism, it should be accurately described in the lead that it is most specifically a virus. Natureium (talk) 14:34, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

citing a new study

User:Doseiai2 added a sentence to the lead, which I edited to make it hopefully easier to read as follows: "Previous studies of bacteriophages tended to be shunned in the West because of scientific uncertainty of which exact organisms were infecting bacteria. A 2018 study highly suggests that diverse phages work in a team to take out bacterial defenses." It would help to convert this link into the standard <ref>...</ref> format using a standard Wikipedia:Citation templates. Sadly, I don't feel I can take the time for this right now. Hopefully someone else can do this. DavidMCEddy (talk) 01:48, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

Conspiracy theory?

User:184.60.208.105 deleted some text claiming s/he "Got rid of a conspiracy theory." The deletion is as follows:

Phages are widely distributed in locations populated by bacterial hosts, such as soil or the intestines of animals. One of the densest natural sources for phages and other viruses is seawater, where up to 9×10⁸ virions per millilitre have been found in microbial mats at the surface,<ref name="mmbr">{{Cite journal | last1 = Wommack | first1 = K. E. | last2 = Colwell | first2 = R. R. | doi = 10.1128/MMBR.64.1.69-114.2000 | title = Virioplankton: Viruses in Aquatic Ecosystems | journal = Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews | volume = 64 | issue = 1 | pages = 69–114 | year = 2000 | pmid = 10704475| pmc =98987 }}</ref> and up to 70% of marine bacteria may be infected by phages.<ref name="Prescott">Prescott, L. (1993). Microbiology, Wm. C. Brown Publishers, {{ISBN|0-697-01372-3}}</ref> They have been used for over 90 years as an alternative to antibiotics in the former Soviet Union and Central Europe as well as in France.<ref name="horizon">BBC Horizon (1997): ''The Virus that Cures'' – Documentary about the history of phage medicine in Russia and the West</ref> They are seen as a possible therapy against multi-drug-resistant strains of many bacteria (see phage therapy).<ref name="fmicb">{{Cite journal | last1 = Keen | first1 = E. C. | title = Phage Therapy: Concept to Cure | doi = 10.3389/fmicb.2012.00238 | journal = Frontiers in Microbiology | volume = 3 | pages = 238 | year = 2012 | pmid = 22833738| pmc = 3400130}}</ref> Nevertheless, phages of Inoviridae have been shown to complicate biofilms involved in pneumonia and cystic fibrosis and shelter the bacteria from drugs meant to eradicate disease, thus promote persistent infection.<ref>http://phys.org/news/2015-11-bacteria-bacteriophages-collude-formation-clinically.html</ref>

Previous studies of bacteriophages tended to be shunned in the West because of scientific uncertainty of which exact organisms were infecting bacteria.

Only the last sentence does not seem solidly grounded in sources that seem credible to me. That sentence is a distortion of claims I've seen in the literature but cannot find right now in the time I have available for this. I plan to restore the rest of this deletion. If User:184.60.208.105 or anyone else wishes to contest this, let's discuss here. Thanks. DavidMCEddy (talk) 14:40, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

Thanks David, it was vandalism, and I agree with you regarding the last statement. Graham Beards (talk) 15:05, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

In the US during the 1920s and 1930s?

As of 2018-08018 the section on "Phage therapy" begins, "Phages were discovered to be antibacterial agents and were used in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia (pioneered there by Giorgi Eliava with help from the co-discoverer of bacteriophages, Felix d'Herelle) and in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s for treating bacterial infections."

Is this correct regarding "and in the United States"? I am NOT a phage therapy expert, but I do not recall having seen that, and if it were true, I think I would have seen it in the sources I've read. I therefore plan to delete that phrase. If someone things otherwise, they should provide a credible source.

Also, it is my understanding that they were used all over the Soviet Union. However, I don't have time to check my sources on that right now, so I'll leave that as is for the moment. Thanks. DavidMCEddy (talk) 16:00, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

Again, you are right. Bacteriophages were not used for this purpose in the US, but were used in Russia (Soviet Union) and Poland well into the antibiotic era. Ref. Shors, Teri (2017). Understanding Viruses. Jones and Bartlett Publishers, pp 26−27. ISBN 978-1284025927 Graham Beards (talk) 18:24, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

Thanks. Might you have time and interest in adding that reference?

How familiar are you with adding references? I can describe three ways:

1. the quickest but not recommended way between <ref>...</ref>,
2. what I think is the traditionally recommended way using Template:Citation, and
3. the new WikiCite way that uses Wikidata and makes it easier for someone else to use that same reference in, e.g., another language version of Wikipedia but is not well documented and takes a bit more work perhaps than Template:Citation, at least the first time you do it.

By the way, between 2015 and 2017, I got pages in the US from the George Eliava Institute in Tbilisi, Georgia. My wife had a strain of pseudomonas that was increasingly resistant to all antibiotics. We saw a naturopath near Portland, OR, who was legally allowed to prescribed them for her here in the US, and they seemed to have successfully eradicated the pseudomonas that the available antibiotics failed to eradicate.

Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 22:50, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

File:Phage.jpg scheduled for POTD

Hello! This is to let editors know that the featured picture File:Phage.jpg, which is used in this article, has been selected as the English Wikipedia's picture of the day (POTD) for May 24, 2020. A preview of the POTD is displayed below and can be edited at Template:POTD/2020-05-24. Any improvements or maintenance to this article should be made before its scheduled appearance on the Main Page. If there are any concerns, please place a message at Wikipedia talk:Picture of the day. Thank you! Cwmhiraeth (talk) 09:34, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

A bacteriophage is a virus that infects and replicates within bacteria and archaea. Bacteriophages are among the most common and diverse entities in the biosphere, found wherever bacteria are present. Early evidence of their existence came when the English bacteriologist Ernest Hanbury Hankin reported in 1896 that something in the waters of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India had a marked antibacterial action against cholera, but was so minute that it could pass through a very fine porcelain filter.

This picture is a transmission electron micrograph at approximately 200,000× magnification, showing numerous bacteriophages attached to the exterior of a bacterium's cell wall.

Photograph credit: Graham Beards

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Nobel prize relevance

Trimton: Are you questioning the relevance because there is only one sentence about the Nobel, this is the only mention of Delbrück et al, and it doesn't mention phages? It does seem relevant to me but I think it could use more explanation. It's almost as if someone came through Wikipedia and scrubbed all discussion of the 1969 physiology Nobel. For example the Nobel is only mentioned in passing at the article on Salvador Luria, with no discussion of what he actually did or the significance of the work. GA-RT-22 (talk) 20:44, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

This article currently says the Nobel was awarded "for their discoveries of the replication of viruses and their genetic structure". Sure, bacteriophages are viruses. But what does the reader do with that information? It's not directly relevant to bacteriophages, unless the Nobel was in part awarded for bacteriophage research. Was it? Trimton (talk) 23:13, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

As I understand it, Delbrück et al did their virus research on bacteriophages. I agree the article needs work, and in its current form the relevance is not obvious. Unfortunately I'm not an expert and my local library is closed so I don't think I can help here. GA-RT-22 (talk) 02:17, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Bacteriophage

Why bacteriophage virus is a complex virus??? 42.201.192.22 (talk) 16:56, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Microbial Symbiosis and Microbiomes

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 16 August 2022 and 14 December 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Lifessojourner (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Lifessojourner (talk) 00:05, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Bacteriophage/prophage symbiosis

I am going to add a section on the lysogenic nature of some bacteriophage that work symbiotically with their bacterial host. These prophage often contribute to a fitness advantage. The prophage wiki article doesn't seem to mention the beneficial nature some phage integrations offer to their bacterial host either, but I feel that ultimately this section would be best served here in the Bacteriophage article as it will refer directly to bacteriophage integration and subsequent host symbiosis. I do believe this article is missing this key aspect of the bacteriophage/bacteria relationship. - Lifessojourner Lifessojourner (talk) 19:22, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

You might find these papers useful:

• Obeng N, Pratama AA, Elsas JD (June 2016). "The Significance of Mutualistic Phages for Bacterial Ecology and Evolution". Trends in Microbiology. 24 (6): 440–449. doi:10.1016/j.tim.2015.12.009. PMID 26826796.
• Kirsch JM, Brzozowski RS, Faith D, Round JL, Secor PR, Duerkop BA (September 2021). "Bacteriophage-Bacteria Interactions in the Gut: From Invertebrates to Mammals". Annual Review of Virology. 8 (1): 95–113. doi:10.1146/annurev-virology-091919-101238. PMID 34255542.

Graham Beards (talk) 19:28, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! I will look into them. Lifessojourner (talk) 19:54, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion

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Please add info on CRISPR systems in phages

Please add some info on/from this study to the article, possibly into a new section. It's currently featured in 2022 in science like so:

A study reports phages have a large variety of CRISPR-Cas systems. They possibly may use them to edit hosts' genes and for competitive advantages, e.g. against rival phages. These systems could be useful for CRISPR-Cas gene editing.

If nobody adds it (you could use an extended version of the above text), please at least clarify the tagged issues so I can add it instead in a probably quite suboptimal way. The content may also be relevant elsewhere but I'm not sure if, where and how.

References

Prototyperspective (talk) 15:22, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

This is all covered in CRISPR and probably doesn't merit repeating here.Graham Beards (talk) 15:28, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, didn't know about the section "Use by phages" there.

However, info from that study is not yet included there and I think it would be good if it was briefly mentioned somewhere in the article with a wikilink to CRISPR#Use by phages. Prototyperspective (talk) 18:24, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

We don't usually cite primary research papers and prefer secondary sources such as reviews and textbooks.Graham Beards (talk) 18:55, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

There are 2 secondaries but they are News articles. However they are Science News and Nature News. Additionally the coauthors include Doudna and Staskawicz. Is that good enough now or should we wait GB? Invasive Spices (talk) 20:36, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

I think we should wait for a review. The Science and Nature articles are editorials rather than systematic reviews and as amazing as this discovery is, the only source we have to date is a primary one. We edit an encyclopaedia, not a scientific journal; there is no hurry. If this is as important as I think it is, we won't have to wait for long. If you or other editors disagree, I am happy to concede to the consensus. Graham Beards (talk) 21:48, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

@Prototyperspective: I agree there will be WP:SECONDARYs soon and it is not necessary now. Invasive Spices (talk) 18:23, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

Ok, fine.

I doubt current reviews are not made far more slowly and rarely than you two appear to think but I could be wrong about that...and even if I'm not it could be good to wait to include this at the linked article even if that takes many years (including because the tagged issues may get clarified better by then)...it's up to you and other editors. Prototyperspective (talk) 19:49, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

Number of Estimated Phages on Earth

Current citation link is incorrect. Link should be to https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resmic.2008.05.001 Where they estimate 10^31, however, they themselves provide no calculation details. 2600:1700:89A0:1470:8DDD:F9B6:EA00:C718 (talk) 17:16, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

original calculation has been found here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.96.5.2192 2600:1700:89A0:1470:8DDD:F9B6:EA00:C718 (talk) 17:22, 12 March 2024 (UTC)