Student Presenter(s): Adnan Alladin
Faculty Mentor: Bryan Gibb
Department: Biological and Chemical Sciences
School/College: College of Arts and Sciences, Long Island

When the word organism is mentioned, we tend to think of animals, plants, maybe even bacteria. However, the majority of organisms often go unnoticed. Bacteriophages are the most abundant biological organism on the planet, at an estimated 10^31 bacteriophages. That means there are more phages than every other organism on Earth, including bacteria, combined! Despite the sheer abundance of phages, there is a lack of genomic data for these creatures. This gap in knowledge represents one of the largest reservoirs of genomic "dark matter" on the planet. Recent studies into this field have paved the way for revolutionary scientific advancements, such as CRISPR technology, for which phage genes were critical in its development. As scientists enter these new frontiers, isolating new phages which have genes with no known function, genomic sequencing becomes a primary objective. Thanks to recent advances in DNA sequencing technology, the cost of sequencing genomes has been greatly reduced. It has also become easier to sequence new genomes. There are different sequencing technologies that can be rather sensitive to DNA purity and integrity. We want to optimize a pipeline for sequencing bacterial and bacteriophage genomes using both Illumina and Oxford Nanopore sequencing technologies. To do this we are testing a variety of DNA isolation and purification protocols and kits to determine how to collect high quality data while minimizing cost and labor involved in preparing samples.