How to Use bacteriophage in a Sentence

bacteriophage

noun
Definition of bacteriophagenext
  • This virus is a bacteriophage or phage, a group of viruses that kill bacteria.
    — San Diego Union-Tribune, 8 July 2019
  • The models were based on the spread of bacteriophage aerosols used as a surrogate to estimate the airborne spread of the coronavirus.
    — Angela Dewan, CNN, 15 Apr. 2021
  • An emerging option is known as phage therapy, which relies on a type of virus known as a bacteriophage.
    — Sarah Kuta, Smithsonian Magazine, 3 Oct. 2023
  • Smith was working on what some call the deadliest beings on Earth, bacteriophages.
    — David Grossman, Popular Mechanics, 3 Oct. 2018
  • Available on YouTube, the over two-minute video shows the bacteriophage at the 0:27 time mark infecting an unidentified bacterium.
    — Miriam Fauzia, USA TODAY, 27 July 2021
  • An autopsy later showed that the phage therapy had been working: the bacteriophages had reached their targets and were doing what they were supposed to do.
    — Diane Shader Smith, STAT, 13 Nov. 2019
  • Using a technique called phage display, each fragment was inserted into a bacteriophage, a type of virus that sticks to bacteria.
    — Pam Belluck, New York Times, 21 Oct. 2019
  • Students in the program learn to isolate and characterize bacteriophages, annotate the phage genomes, and then submit the sequences to a national database.
    — Zahra Ahmad, Science | AAAS, 12 July 2017
  • When Church and his colleagues replaced all 321 instances of one redundant codon with another in E. coli, the bacteria became resistant to the bacteriophage T7 virus.
    — Sharon Begley, STAT, 1 May 2018
  • But with the discovery of antibiotics, bacteriophage research became largely forgotten, at least in the West.
    — WIRED, 27 Sep. 2022
  • The researchers, in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, saved the patient with the help of bacteria-destroying viruses known as bacteriophages that occur naturally and are the most populous organisms on the planet.
    — Brianna Abbott, WSJ, 8 May 2019
  • After word got out that Strathdee and her husband’s doctors had managed to save his life with a bacteriophage — literally, a bacteria-eater — her inbox filled with pleas for a repeat performance.
    — Eric Boodman, STAT, 21 June 2018
  • Later that year, the team built another cog in the wheel of biological computing: the ability to send arbitrary messages between cells, again with help from a bacteriophage called M13.
    — Anil Ananthaswamy, Discover Magazine, 28 Aug. 2014
  • Each bacteriophage displayed a specific fragment on its surface like a billboard.
    — Pam Belluck, New York Times, 21 Oct. 2019
  • The treatment, called phage therapy, uses bacteriophages, which are tiny viruses that appear to have an uncanny ability to destroy some of the most lethal strains of drug-resistant bacteria.
    — Alexandra Sifferlin, Time, 18 Dec. 2017
  • Necessary Scientists often turn to bacteria and the bacteriophage viruses that prey on them to learn about coevolution.
    — Quanta Magazine, 6 Jan. 2020
  • Meet the phages Viruses that specialize in infecting bacteria are often called bacteriophages, or simply phages.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 18 July 2018
  • Scientists stumbled upon them more than a half-century ago while hunting for another type of murderous microbe called a bacteriophage, or phage, a virus that can infect and kill bacteria.
    — Star Tribune, 27 Aug. 2020
  • Scientists douse fruits and vegetables in a solution containing good bugs, like bacteriophages, that kills the bad bugs, like salmonella or listeria.
    — Rebecca Huval, WIRED, 7 Mar. 2018
  • More importantly, the bacteriophages didn’t cause any of the common side-effects that antibiotics cause, like a weakened immune system or gastrointestinal problems.
    — Avery Thompson, Popular Mechanics, 11 June 2018
  • Angela Belchersuccessfully transformed the M13 bacteriophage, a virus harmless to humans, into the cathode and anode of a lithium-ion battery.
    — Jeremy Jacquot, Discover Magazine, 26 Aug. 2010
  • These resemble the business end of bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria.
    — San Diego Union-Tribune, 13 July 2019
  • When that bacteriophage infects another host, the bit of bacterial DNA gets incorporated into the new host’s genome in a process called specialized transduction.
    — Quanta Magazine, 16 Oct. 2018
  • Some scientists see promise in a treatment called bacteriophage therapy.
    — Allison Parshall, Scientific American, 14 Apr. 2023
  • Why not try infecting her husband with bacteria-hunting viruses called bacteriophages?
    — Paul Sisson, sandiegouniontribune.com, 26 Apr. 2017
  • After a long career in microbiology, 80-year-old Carl Merrill recently came out of retirement to pursue another germ-killing weapon: a family of germ-killing viruses known as bacteriophages.
    — NBC News, 20 Oct. 2017
  • But to support that statement, Live Water links to a Wikipedia page about phage therapy, which uses viruses (not bacteria) to combat bacterial infections (phage or bacteriophage are terms for viruses that infect bacteria).
    — Beth Mole, Ars Technica, 3 Jan. 2018
  • Traditional antibiotics kill broadly, so the group enlisted UCSD colleagues who study therapeutic uses of bacteriophages, or phages.
    — Eva Frederick, Science | AAAS, 13 Nov. 2019
  • Nature has also offered a potential solution: bacteriophage, viruses that naturally destroy bacteria.
    — Dana Taylor, USA TODAY, 31 July 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'bacteriophage.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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