University of Leicester screens Dudley Zoo animal droppings for new bacteriophages

Dr Andrew Millard's team at the University of Leicester has analysed dung samples from nearly every animal at Dudley Zoo to build a large phage library for finding phages that best fight different bacterial infections. Droppings contain many bacteria and therefore many phages, a quick way to assemble a diverse collection; skink dung already showed clear gaps in the petri dish where phages had killed bacteria.