Fig 1.

(A) Summary of the experimental design and results: The input phage cocktail consisted of three phages (1) that could collectively infect and lyse three of the target bacterial hosts used in the Appelmans protocol (2). A prophage was induced from a clinical isolate strain within the first three rounds (3) that could infect five of the target strains (4). The three clinical isolates were removed from Appelmans due to slow growth rates after the third round. The prophage persisted through the ninth (final) round of Appelmans (5) and comprised half of the sequenced phage samples isolated from the experiment (6). (B) Experimental layout of the Appelmans protocol in a 96-well plate. (1) The input phage cocktail is diluted and applied to each bacterial host; (2) overnight incubation results in lysed, cleared wells (green) and unlysed, uncleared wells (yellow); (3) all lysed and the first unlysed well are pooled (red outline) and used as the input phage cocktail for subsequent rounds.