Student Presenter(s): Domenico Carroll, Yash Patel
Faculty Mentors: Bryan Gibb, Leonidas Salichos
Department: Biological and Chemical Sciences
School/College: College of Arts and Sciences, Long Island

Bacteriophages are specialized viruses that attack specific bacteria. In past years, more attention and research have been given to phages, as the effectiveness of antibiotics decreases, phages are a viable alternative as they do not harm human cells. As the most abundant biological entity on the planet, you can find them just about anywhere. Like all biological entities, phages have genomes. For phages to be viable alternatives to antibiotics, we have to be able to read and understand their genomes through genome sequencing. Genome sequencing has many subparts to it, most notably annotating the genome and its function. Annotating the genome reveals the structure of the genome and how many genes it has, whereas annotating the function reveals that gene's impact on the organism. Using DNA Master, PhagesDB and Phamerator allowed us to both annotate and characterize the different genes in the phage Eraser. Eraser infects Arthobacter globiformus, which is a soil-dwelling non-pathogenic bacteria. By implementing an automated gene annotation, we identified 71 genes in Eraser. Here, we present our annotation process resulting in the functional characterization of genes 36, 37, and 38 using computational tools. We compared this region of genes to other genes of the same cluster, AZ. Gene 36 is a Holliday Junction Resolvase, Gene 37 does not have any function and Gene 38 is DNA primase/helicase. We wish to explore why a gene with an unknown function comes between these two functions.