Lu Fan

Phage therapy needs a matching phage for each clinical bacterial isolate, and conventional experimental screening is slow and labor-intensive. PhageHost-GNN encodes phage receptor-binding proteins and bacterial K-locus proteins as sequence, structure and genomic-context embeddings, feeds them to a graph neural network, and automatically selects the embedding model best suited to how novel a query strain is relative to the training set. On the Spain-derived Beamud2023 data, with both hosts and phages unseen, the routed model reached an AUPRC of 0.671, while fixed-embedding models stayed at or below 0.036.

Phage therapy needs a matching phage for each clinical bacterial isolate, and conventional experimental screening is slow and labor-intensive. PhageHost-GNN encodes phage receptor-binding proteins and bacterial K-locus proteins as sequence, structure and genomic-context embeddings, feeds them to a graph neural network, and automatically selects the embedding model best suited to how novel a query strain is relative to the training set. On the Spain-derived Beamud2023 data, with both hosts and phages unseen, the routed model reached an AUPRC of 0.671, while fixed-embedding models stayed at or below 0.036.