The world of phages is more than a little scary. They have been evolving for billions of years, their numbers are so vast every writer in this anthology resorts to scientific notation, and their generation time is as low as minutes, making for dizzying amounts of selection pressure and optimization – phages seem to have explored every possible way of attacking, subverting bacteria, replicating faster, compacting and making themselves more efficient, and won every arms-race bacteria started with them.

2023-01-12: And the reverse

A species of plankton that populate freshwater worldwide is the world’s first known organism that survives and thrives by dining on viruses alone, an advance that sheds new light on the role of viruses in the global food web. This virus-only diet – “virovory” – is enough to fuel the growth and reproduction of a species of Halteria, a single-celled organism known for the minuscule hairs.

2025-09-18: Viable AI-mutated phages

the researchers mixed all 16 AI-generated phages with ΦX174 and then threw them into a tube with E. coli cells. Because the phages were forced to compete for the same host cells, the variants that reproduced fastest would dominate. By sequencing the phages over time, the researchers could track which phages were gaining ground and which were falling behind. Several of the AI phages consistently outperformed wild ΦX174, with one variant (called Evo-Φ69) increasing to 65x its starting level.

Ultimately, these 16 AI-generated phages were not only viable; in many cases, they were more infectious than wildtype ΦX174 despite carrying major genome alterations that a human would be unlikely to rationally design.

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