Conversely, anti-defence systems are more common in temperate phages. Likely to protect their host lysogen from invading phages. A small number of phages also carried both defence and anti-defence, highlighting the complex selection pressures they face

Anti-defence systems are widespread on (mostly virulent) phages. Some of them co-occur. It's know that defence systems act synergistically and don't co-occur randomly in bacteria (Great work by @NobregaFL lab)- maybe phages are similar for their anti-defence repertoires?

Genomic properties of sequenced phages are broadly the same in 2026 vs 2021, not necessarily surprising. We predicted lifestyles with PhaTYP- wondering if this is a phage specific field that GenBank entries could allow submitters to add this where known?

Massive changes in phage taxonomy. RIP to Myo-, Podo- and Siphoviridae. Hello to genomically defined families. Huge community efforts have re-classified many of these but still many to go (especially former Sipho)

A small number of clinically/agriculturally relevant genera dominate as isolation hosts (~50% of phages from only 6 genera). Escherichia has also displaced Mycobacterium as #1. Big jumps up for Vibrio and Klebsiella also. Strep decrease due to removal of satellite phages

In raw numbers, the number of complete phage genomes from cultured isolates has doubled but the amount of unique genomes has slightly decreased- we're starting to sequence the same phages again. People are also getting better at giving their phages unique names!

Found (pro)phages carrying virulence genes. Patients with neuA-encoding Haemophilus phages had 82-fold higher bacterial loads (p=5.5×10⁻⁴). First evidence of virulence factor-encoding phages enhancing pathogen colonisation in human respiratory tract (that I know of?) 7/9

Four patients had extreme viral loads (>10% metagenomic reads). Two had eukaryotic viruses, two had bacteriophage "blooms" - single phages dominating the community. These acute events may reveal boom-bust dynamics in COPD viral ecology 6/9

Phages infecting oral anaerobes were disproportionately lower. Porphyromonas phages: 40-fold lower despite only 4-fold bacterial reduction. Pathogen-associated phages unchanged. Kill-the-Winner dynamics persist but weaken with severity (maybe the winner's been killed) 5/9

Despite diversity loss, viral communities showed minimal structuring by clinical phenotype. Only 4.5% variance explained by ABE groups. With bacterial communities showing stronger clinical associations 4/9

Viral diversity progressively declined with COPD severity. Most striking: frequent exacerbators (Group E) showed complete decoupling of viral-bacterial diversity (ρ=0.052, p=0.833) while other groups maintained strong correlations (ρ>0.5) 3/9