Protein-level prediction of Klebsiella phage adsorption identifies conserved receptor-binding motifs. (opens in new tab)

Bacteriophage therapy offers a potential route to treat antibiotic-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae infections, but its use is limited by the narrow specificity of phage-host interactions. In Klebsiella, adsorption is largely determined by receptor-binding proteins (RBPs) that recognize bacterial capsular polysaccharides, yet current machine learning approaches often represent whole phages rather than the individual proteins that mediate recognition. Here, we ask whether adsorption can be pred...