A synthetic phageome reveals widespread and diverse human antibody responses to bacteriophages

PhageScan profiling of 192 healthy donors shows widespread strong IgG reactivity to bacteriophages, with ImmE endolysin recognized by 59.9% of individuals.

• Why it matters: Bacteriophages colonize humans, but how humoral immunity recognizes them is unclear, limiting understanding of phage–antibody interactions.
• What they did: The PhIP-Seq platform PhageScan used 277,051 phage and 49,630 human viral oligopeptides to map serum specificity, identifying 12,576 significantly enriched peptides across at least two individuals.
• The result: ImmE-reactive sera reduced antibacterial activity, and strongly immunogenic epitopes skewed toward phages infecting pathogenic bacteria while public epitopes were enriched in environmental and food-associated phages.

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