How to Use phage in a Sentence

phage

noun
  • The challenge, of course, is which phages should be chosen to do the job?
    — Paul Sisson, sandiegouniontribune.com, 26 Apr. 2017
  • The clear spots are areas where phage have killed the bacterium.
    — David A. Shaywitz, WSJ, 4 Aug. 2023
  • Doctors and researchers made the bold decision to try out the phage.
    — Beth Mole, Ars Technica, 20 Mar. 2018
  • Now, an equivalent process could be done in a week using phage display.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 3 Oct. 2018
  • Bacteria have plenty of ways to combat the viruses that plague them, called phages.
    — Diana Gitig, Ars Technica, 5 Dec. 2018
  • This month, Bunevacz should finally be able to start his phage therapy.
    — Nicola Twilley, The New Yorker, 14 Dec. 2020
  • Finding the right phage for treatment can take time, and then batches of phages need to be grown and purified.
    — Emily Mullin, WIRED, 10 Sep. 2024
  • Strathdee reached out to scientists publishing phage research at the time.
    — Popular Science, 12 Oct. 2023
  • What the findings do reveal, however, is that there is a world of phages ripe for exploration.
    — Alice Park, TIME, 9 Oct. 2024
  • This virus is a bacteriophage or phage, a group of viruses that kill bacteria.
    — San Diego Union-Tribune, 8 July 2019
  • The effort that is furthest along, however, relies on a phage enzyme called a lysin rather than on whole phages.
    — Claudia Wallis, Scientific American, 26 May 2020
  • The downside of such specificity is that a phage might only knock out the bacteria in one sick person.
    — Dana Taylor, USA TODAY, 31 July 2023
  • The team decided to test its hunch that the cluster of sequences represented a new phage defense.
    — Elizabeth Pennisi, Science | AAAS, 11 Nov. 2020
  • Running phages through modern clinical testing has proved difficult in the past.
    — Kelly Servick, Science | AAAS, 21 June 2018
  • While researching last-resort options, Strathdee came across research on using phages.
    — Alexandra Sifferlin, Time, 21 June 2018
  • Bono worked with a phage strain that infects Pseudomonas syringae, a bacterium that causes disease in plants.
    — Ed Yong, Discover Magazine, 17 Oct. 2012
  • And the compounds released from gut cells when cells are dying or damaged proved to be the most effective at activating phages.
    — New Atlas, 16 Oct. 2025
  • For more than a century researchers have tried to use phages as a treatment for bacterial infections.
    — Karen Weintraub, USA TODAY, 30 July 2023
  • Some phage therapy centers offer the treatment at free or reduced cost, however.
    — Allison Parshall, Scientific American, 14 Apr. 2023
  • Each tiny, tripod-looking phage has evolved to hunt, attack and gobble up a specific bacterial species.
    — Issy Ronald, CNN, 9 Oct. 2024
  • The result is a five-phage product capable of killing a broad range of Enterobacter isolates.
    — Neetika Walter, Interesting Engineering, 25 Sep. 2025
  • The team discovered the retron normally keeps the toxin under wraps, but activates it in the presence of phage proteins.
    — Elizabeth Pennisi, Science | AAAS, 11 Nov. 2020
  • In this model, the survival of the host determines the survival of the phage, so the phage has a vested interest in maintaining its host.
    — David Pride, Scientific American, 7 Dec. 2020
  • Once overshadowed by penicillin, phage research is now getting a second look as scientists race to find new ways to fight infections.
    — Alice Gibbs, MSNBC Newsweek, 11 Sep. 2025
  • The startup is working with bacteria-eating viruses called phages to isolate proteins that can make superbug-killing drugs.
    — Ari Altstedter, Bloomberg.com, 25 June 2018
  • Researchers are also developing premixed phage cocktails for some of the more common superbug strains.
    — Claudia Wallis, Scientific American, 26 May 2020
  • Moving to a 'simple' phage to something more complex such as bacteria - something that AI simply won't be able to do at this point.
    — Alex Harrington, MSNBC Newsweek, 17 Sep. 2025
  • 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
  • When Jalasvuori added a phage called PRD1, that proportion fell to just 5% within 10 days.
    — Ed Yong, Discover Magazine, 31 May 2011
  • The engineering left only a cassette containing the genes responsible for copying the phage genome.
    — Diana Gitig, Ars Technica, 5 Feb. 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'phage.' 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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