Minor Tail Proteins in Bacteriophages
Student Presenter(s): Alessandro Drudi, Valerie Martinez
Faculty Mentors: Bryan Gibb, Leonidas Salichos
Department: Biological and Chemical Sciences
School/College: College of Arts and Sciences, Long Island
Minor tail proteins play an important role in tail assembly of bacteriophages. A bacteriophage is a virus that infects bacteria. Each type is specific for a single bacterial species virus. Bacteriophages destroy their host cells and when they attach to a bacterial cell. Phage tails are constructed from repeating subunits of tail proteins. Some minor tail proteins have enzymatic activity and it helps the phage recognize the correct host, get through the cell surface, or through the cell wall to inject the DNA. The phage we are exploring is called Eraser which affects Arthrobacter Globiformis, a soil-dwelling non-pathogenic bacteria. Phage Eraser was isolated by NYIT students outside of Theobald Hall and characterized and sequenced. We are doing a genomic analysis of the bacteriophage using a number of bioinformatics tools. Using the gene exploration tool Phamerator as well as databases like PhagesDB, we were able to identify the functions of many of the genes in Eraser, including those coding for tail proteins. These tools also allowed us to compare the genes in Eraser with other related bacteriophages and see that these regions are highly conserved among closely related bacteriophages. In conclusion, the use of functional prediction using computational tools is important because you can quickly get a functional characterization for a specific genomic region.