Information
ViralZone is powered by the Swiss Bioinformatics Resource Portal Expasy and is a great source of information not only for phages but for viruses in general. It gives you beautiful particle and genome structures of viral type strains and a plethora of links to literature and databases associated with them.
Life in Our Phage World is a free book to celebrate a century of phage exploration. It is very informative and exciting to read. It holds excellent drawings and inspires the reader with the beauty of the phages.
When set to bacteria as host, the NCBI viral genome browser is an excellent source of information about the currently published and available phage genome sequences. The list can be downloaded as a comma-separated table and parsed for other purposes.
International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) authorizes and organizes the taxonomic classification of and the nomenclatures for viruses. It gives one the possibility to place an isolate into a bigger context and is of great help if one like to find out about related phages.
SubtiWiki collects and connects knowledge about the gram-positive model organism Bacillus subtilis 168. It connects research, researchers, and results and is extremely useful when working with this model organism.
How to write a scientific publication or thesis. A short but precious video tutorial by Prof. Pete Carr from the University of Minnesota. Three video tutorials (Introduction, Results, Discussion) presented by Gregor Bucher from the University of Göttingen. Excellent content, particularly for students, to get a first idea and concept on scientific writing.
Networks
The (German) National Phage Forum provides a platform for all scientists and professionals who are interested in sharing knowledge and engage in joint research projects promoting the use of bacteriophages in medicine, veterinary sciences, as well as in the food and environmental sector.
Phage Directory’s mission is to help unlock the untapped potential of phages for phage therapy and biocontrol by empowering people to access, use and build upon the world’s phage knowledge. An exciting networking website, particularly if one is looking for a PhD position in phage research.
Webtools
PHASTER is a web tool from the Wishard Research Group to predict prophage regions in prokaryotic genomes. It can be supplied with a simple sequence fasta file and gives you a first idea about potential prophage elements and the annotation of their genes. Even the system was not designed to annotate genomes of viral phage isolates, it also gives good results with those.
The Genome2D web server has many tools for genomic and transcriptomic analysis of prokaryotic data.