Can therapy become routine?
Cocktails, regulation and rapid matching are unsolved at scale. Case reports are not a system.
Can hospitals keep phage banks as narrow, evolving tools beside antibiotics? The science is real; the logistics are the bottleneck.
Most phage genomes in metagenomes have no close laboratory relative. The ocean and the gut are still unnamed libraries.
Open questions
How fast is phage resistance?
Bacteria lose receptors or take CRISPR souvenirs. Evolution is expected, not a scandal.
What do most gut phages do?
Many are temperate. Whether they stabilise or scramble a microbiome is still argued.
Jumbo phages — why so large?
Genomes over 200 kb build nucleus-like compartments in some hosts. Function is being mapped.
How do phages shape oceans?
The viral shunt moves carbon away from fish food webs into dissolved soup. Magnitudes are still debated.
This atlas will not discuss how to isolate, grow or engineer phages. The frontier questions below stay public and conceptual.
Keep exploring
More in Tree of microbes
Bacteria
Single-celled prokaryotes with cell walls ? the oldest widespread life form, and both partners and pathogens.
Familiarity 95Viruses
Packets of DNA or RNA that are not cells — they replicate only inside living hosts.
Familiarity 96Fungi
A eukaryotic kingdom of yeasts, moulds and mushrooms — chitin walls, external digestion, partners of plants.
Familiarity 80Archaea
A prokaryotic domain that is not bacteria — methanogens, extremophiles and no known human pathogens.
Familiarity 35Protozoa
Motile unicellular eukaryotes — a teaching grade that includes pond ciliates and a minority of serious parasites.
Familiarity 58