How to Use bacteriophage in a Sentence

bacteriophage

noun
  • This virus is a bacteriophage or phage, a group of viruses that kill bacteria.
    — San Diego Union-Tribune, 8 July 2019
  • 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
  • The viruses in the study are both categorized as bacteriophages.
    — Laura Baisas, Popular Science, 9 Nov. 2023
  • The method taps bacteriophages, a type of virus that infects and kills bacteria, to combat infections.
    — Popular Science, 12 Oct. 2023
  • 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
  • Each bacteriophage displayed a specific fragment on its surface like a billboard.
    — Pam Belluck, New York Times, 21 Oct. 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
  • Why not try infecting her husband with bacteria-hunting viruses called bacteriophages?
    — Paul Sisson, sandiegouniontribune.com, 26 Apr. 2017
  • Some scientists see promise in a treatment called bacteriophage therapy.
    — Allison Parshall, Scientific American, 14 Apr. 2023
  • To tackle this, the Monash team turned to bacteriophages — viruses that naturally infect and kill bacteria.
    — Neetika Walter, Interesting Engineering, 25 Sep. 2025
  • Scientists already know that the human gut is packed with bacteriophages (phages) – viruses that infect bacteria – but most of this knowledge comes from metagenomics.
    — New Atlas, 16 Oct. 2025
  • These resemble the business end of bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria.
    — San Diego Union-Tribune, 13 July 2019
  • Enlarge / Schematic depiction of the aerosolization and spread of a bacteriophage to adjacent areas after flushing with the lid open and the lid closed.
    — Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 31 Jan. 2024
  • Meet the phages Viruses that specialize in infecting bacteria are often called bacteriophages, or simply phages.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 18 July 2018
  • But with the discovery of antibiotics, bacteriophage research became largely forgotten, at least in the West.
    — WIRED, 27 Sep. 2022
  • This evidence supported the idea that both types of bacteriophages were actually interacting with each other.
    — Laura Baisas, Popular Science, 9 Nov. 2023
  • 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
  • These remarkable entities were named bacteriophages — literally bacteria-eaters — or phages for short.
    — Cecilia.butini, Vox, 4 June 2024
  • Necessary Scientists often turn to bacteria and the bacteriophage viruses that prey on them to learn about coevolution.
    — Quanta Magazine, 6 Jan. 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
  • This discovery resulted from an exhaustive study of the bacteriophage T4, a virus that infects bacteria.
    — William A. Haseltine, Forbes, 29 Mar. 2024
  • 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
  • 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
  • At birth, infants’ bacteriophages often vastly outnumber their microbiome’s bacteria, but this begins to change with exposure to the outside world and as the gut develops.
    — Kate Graham-Shaw, Scientific American, 5 Sep. 2025
  • 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
  • One promising direction is bacteriophage therapy, which uses viruses that specifically infect and kill harmful bacteria.
    — André O. Hudson, The Conversation, 21 Jan. 2026
  • This particular type of recoding has only previously been documented in viruses that infect bacteria–or bacteriophages.
    — Lauren Leffer, Popular Science, 27 Mar. 2025
  • 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
  • The development of antibiotics sidelined bacteriophage use for decades, except in a handful of countries in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
    — Cecilia.butini, Vox, 4 June 2024

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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