Ten quick tips for classifying unknown bacteriophage

In microbiome research, bacteriophages (phages) are gaining increased attention for their roles as important ecological actors, as vehicles of horizontal gene transfer, and as “phagebiotics”—potential tools for precision microbiome manipulation: phage cocktails to suppress specific pathogens/pathobionts, “virome transplants” to restore microbiome diversity and functionality, phage vectors for delivery of CRISPR-Cas for microbiome editing. Once referred to as “viral dark matter” [1,2] of the microbiome, complex populations of bacteriophages are becoming easier to sequence and identify thanks to recent advances in high throughput virome sequencing and phage bioinformatics.