Plural shorthand for viruses that infect members of domain Bacteria.
The term phages is derived from bacteriophages which, in turn,in singular form, comes from the phrase, bactériophage obligatoire of d’Hérelle (1917).
There are three ways to use the plural form of phage. You can never use "phages", which I believe is how ASM addresses the issue. Alternatively, you can reserve "phages" solely for when you are describing multiple types of phages rather than more than virion of the same type. Thus, "In our phage studies we employed cocktails consisting of five different phages at a titer of 108 phage/ml." My preference, though, is to use "phages" under the same circumstances that one would employ the plural for any word. The previous quote therefore would be, "In our phage studies we employed cocktails consisting of five different phages at a titer of 108 phages/ml." While it can be up to the author to decide which convention to use, what cannot be employed is a mixture of these different approaches. Choose one approach and then stick with it.
For additional discussion of the plural form or forms of phage, i.e., phages (or bacteriophages), see Ackermann (2011).
For extended discussion of the concept of phages, see "Bacteriophages (phages)". For a list of phage-pertinent terms, with links to definitions/discussions, see "Glossary of bacteriophage terms". See also phage history.
For a list of book-length references to phages and their biology, both applied and basic, see "Phage monographs." Shorter, chapter-length discussions of phage biology are found in Hyman and Abedon (2009), Abedon (2008), Calendar and Inman (2005), and Guttman et al. (2005).
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