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Escherichia coli is a common bacterium which is often harmless but can cause serious infections.

Some bacteria, like Escherichia coli, are becoming increasingly resistant to conventional antibiotics and developing into what are known as "superbugs."

The first stage was to establish a quality dataset of interactions between 403 diverse Escherichia coli strains and 96 phages.

This method, which can easily be transferred to hospital laboratories, paves the way in the coming years for a strategy whereby a personalized selection of phage treatments can be made rapidly if bacterial infection with highly antibiotic-resistant Escherichia coli is diagnosed.

He and his team used machine learning to look at the genomes of a whole bunch of different strains of Escherichia coli, a bacteria in which different strains repeatedly evolve in convergent ways, to see whether this occurs by chance or by a process of natural selection.