bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
Enhancing Strain-level Phage-Host Prediction through Experimentally Vali-dated Negatives and Feature Optimization Strategies
June 2025 • Min Li, G Y Liu, Wenchen Song, Jianqiang Li, Lijia Ma, Minfeng Xiao
Accurate prediction of phage-host interactions at the strain level is critical for understanding microbial ecology and for developing phage-based therapeutics. However, existing models are limited by the lack of experimentally validated negative interactions and inconsistencies in data construction strategies. In this study, we present a large-scale phage-host interaction dataset com-prising 13,000 experimentally verified links between 125 Klebsiella pneumoniae((K. pneumoniae) phages and 104 K. pneumoniae strains.…