In biology, naming things is a very serious matter.
Taxonomy organizations and multi-committee processes exist to group newly discovered viruses and bacteria and approve their proposed names, which the discoverer usually gets a first crack at.
No shade intended, but scientists are not usually the most creative bunch when it comes to naming things. New names often end up in Latinized form.
However, when microbiologist Yoon Hwang and his colleagues at Naval Medical Research Unit San Antonio discovered a new batch of bacteria-eating viruses known as bacteriophages, they opted for a bit of local flair.
AllMyExes, Riverwalk, Revolver, Alamo, LoneStar, TwoStep, Vaquero, PricklyPear, TexasRanger, Haystack, RioGrande, Stockyards, Pumpjack and GiddyUp are the names of 14 new phages discovered by the local research team.
Other than having Texas- and San Antonio-themed names, these new phages could have important clinical applications — both for U.S. Navy personnel and the general public.
Up until World War II, infected battlefield wounds meant almost certain death.
In 1928, researchers discovered what could become the first antibiotic treatment, penicillin, which became widely available in 1945 and saved thousands of lives during the war. Antibiotics have since become a cornerstone of modern medicine.
“But,” Hwang said, “bacteria are not stupid.”
As antibiotics have seen increased usage — and in many cases been overprescribed — bacteria have developed ways to outmaneuver the medications. Researchers have estimated that nearly 40 million people worldwide could die between 2025 and 2050 from antimicrobial-resistant infections.
“Pharmaceutical companies, they invest billions of dollars to develop new antibiotics,” Hwang said. “But Mother Nature has its own solution already.”
Bacteria’s ‘kryptonite’
Bacteriophages, or phages for short, are viruses that selectively target bacteria but avoid human cells. Nearly every bacterium is hunted by a specific phage — its “kryptonite,” Hwang said.
These viruses typically have a wide head that contains its genetic material, DNA or RNA, and a tail they use to inject it into the bacteria.
Phages can be found wherever bacteria exist. In other words, they’re everywhere. In the ocean alone, for example, researchers have estimated that there are more viruses — most of them phages — than all other ocean organisms.
Of course, just like with antibiotics, bacteria also develop resistance to phages over time. But phages are also able to adapt to these defenses, with each side constantly adapting to outsmart the other.
Researchers are still uncovering new phages and sequencing their genomes, an increasingly important area of biology given the potential to use phages in clinical settings as an alternative or supplement to antibiotics.
Much of that research has taken place in Europe, where phages are actually used in medicine. But it remains a niche area of research in the U.S., Hwang said.
Hwang and his three-person team of researchers are part of Naval Medical Research Unit San Antonio (NAMRU-SA), which aims to advance innovations in military medicine. San Antonio, also known as Military City USA, has a robust military medical research presence.
A surprising military priority
The U.S. Navy’s interest in phages was very specific and somewhat surprising: root canals.
As the research unit’s chief science director, Dr. Darrin Frye explained, the Navy wants to minimize the time sailors spend away from battle, and dental issues can present unique challenges overseas.
Root canals are susceptible to bacterial infections. And a specific bacterium is usually the culprit: Enterococcus faecalis, found in up to 77% of cases where a root canal treatment has failed.
E. faecalis is a bacterium that usually lives happily in our guts, causing no harm, but it can cause major issues when it ends up somewhere it’s not meant to be. Other than dental infections, E. faecalis is also responsible for urinary tract infections, bloodstream infections and heart valve infections, which can be fatal.
E. faecalis is notably resistant to many antibiotics, and it has become increasingly resistant to even some of the strongest antibiotics that are used as a last resort.
In 2024, Hwang and his colleagues set out to find E. faecalis’s kryptonite.
Because E. faecalis is present in our digestive tracts, Hwang and his team figured they could find the bacterium and the phages that feed off it in wastewater.
After collecting sewage samples from wastewater treatment plants in Austin, Arlington and Laredo, the team isolated and sequenced the genomes of 14 newly discovered phages, including one entirely new species. The results were published in “Microbiology Resource Announcements” in August 2025.
Last month, a follow-up paper was published in “PLOS ONE.” Hwang and his team’s results suggest that many of the 14 newly discovered phages effectively wipe out E. faecalis, and could be used in a dental cleaning solution for root canals. They could also potentially be effective against other infections resistant to conventional antibiotics.
When it came to naming the new phages, Hwang deferred to his fellow researchers, technical staff and others from NAMRU-SA, many of them Texas natives.
“A lot of scientists, especially European scientists, have a different mindset,” Hwang said. “They use Latin or something complicated.”
Contributors wrote names on a whiteboard, and a vote was held to determine the winners. Names that did not make the cut included: Spurs, BigBend, Tractor, Biscuit and Brisket.
Hwang was nervous that the National Center for Biotechnology Information, which catalogs genomes in an online database, would scrap their proposed names. But they were officially accepted.
The names will still later have to go through a more thorough review by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses.
Phages’ biggest limitation is their specificity, Hwang explained. A phage that kills one kind of bacteria won’t kill others, and many infections are co-infections, where multiple strains of bacteria are present. That’s especially true in war wounds, Dr. Frye added.
Hwang’s team has already found one way around that problem. In earlier work, they engineered phages to carry genes for antimicrobial peptides, which kill bacteria indiscriminately. When one of these modified phages infects its target, it also releases those peptides, capable of killing other species of bacteria nearby, effectively giving the virus wider reach.
Broadly, Hwang said, these findings add to the growing body of research on phages as a “new frontier” of antibiotics.
“Ultimately, the bacteria will develop resistances to the bacteriophage we identified,” Hwang said. “But we are smarter than bacteria.”
