During Daniela Rothschild Rodriguez’s PhD, a collection of phages (viruses of bacteria) that target Klebsiella spp. – a highly antibiotic-resistant pathogen were created. This collection is called the Klebsiella Phage Collection (KlebPhaCol; www.klebphacol.org) and is positioned to be shared openly with the scientific and medical community to incentivise progressive research on phage therapy as an alternative to antibiotics. One of the key findings during the characterisation of the collection was the identification of a novel phage, RothD. This means that there hasn’t been any formal characterisation of similar phages to it and thus had no taxonomic classification. Daniela was involved in the process to taxonomically classify it, where they found that they were dealing with a whole new family of previously uncharacterised phages. With RothD as the representative phage, a new family of phages, Felixviridae were created. Also found was that Felixviridae phages are associated with the human gut, meaning that these phages form part of the intestinal microbiota of humans. 

The official proposal for the creation of this new family was submitted to the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) last year, and was recently approved.

Read the publication in full here: https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/jgv/10.1099/jgv.0.002111#tab2.