# A comprehensive analysis of the kinetics of infection of lytic bacteriophages specific to the ESKAPE and critical pathogens

## TL;DR

This paper reviews lytic bacteriophages that target dangerous bacteria, summarizing their infection kinetics and other traits to aid in phage therapy development.

## Contribution

The study provides a comprehensive scoping review of phage infection kinetics for ESKAPE and critical pathogens.

## Key findings

- Phage adsorption rates and one-step growth parameters were analyzed across multiple studies.
- Plaque morphology and lytic spectrum were correlated with phage replication kinetics.
- The data can help standardize the in vitro characterization of newly isolated phages.

## Abstract

Bacteriophages are ubiquitous particles that are able to infect bacterial and archaeal cells and may serve as an antimicrobial agent. Herein, a scoping review of strictly lytic bacteriophages infecting bacteria belonging to the ESKAPE group and critical pathogens is proposed in order to summarize information about their biological characteristics in vitro. The data collected herein will be useful for the rapid in vitro characterization of newly isolated phages, facilitating their likely effective use in phage therapy and allowing them to be compared with previously described phages of the same specificity. Data were obtained from original, peer-reviewed, full-length scientific articles published between 1998 and 2025, available in the PubMed database, focusing on the analysis of phage infection kinetics (adsorption rate and parameters derived from one-step growth experiments). However, additional features, including morphology of their plaques (like the presence or absence of a ‘halo’ effect), type of morphology of phage virions or lytic spectrum have also been included, in order to relate acquired data regarding to phage replication cycle kinetics to the mentioned phage characteristics.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11274-025-04762-4.