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

Bacteriophages are increasingly relevant in research and medical fields. It is important to discover and analyze bacteriophages that appear in many places in order to understand better how they infect their host bacteria. There are many new bacteriophages that are discovered every day and are a large reservoir of new genetic information. Genetic engineering technologies such as CRISPR have arisen from research into phage genomes. Therefore, genetic annotation of bacteriophages can be very advantageous. Annotation is the process of finding genes within a genome and then using various tools to determine the function of the genes. Some of these tools are automatic; however, they are imperfect and require some human annotation to form a complete understanding of a genome–especially to avoid perpetuating mistakes that automatic tools may make. In my experience, I have done manual annotation through the SEA-Phage program, and now I am applying this experience to Galaxy CPT and Apollo, which have more automated tools. Galaxy CPT (Center for Phage Technology) and Apollo are platforms that allow collaborative and reproducible annotation. Combining the computerized annotation possible with Galaxy CPT and Apollo with human annotation is a very effective method of annotating phage genomes.