Student Presenter(s): Rahul Ubriani, Salman Khan
Faculty Mentor: Bryan Gibb
Department: Biological and Chemical Sciences
School/College: College of Arts and Sciences, Long Island

Bacteriophages are a type of virus that infects bacteria by injecting its genetic material into the host and utilizes host machinery to reproduce. These mechanisms of infection and their development inside of its host consists of complex processes that enable these phages to be researched heavily. For the purposes of this research, we are interested in subjugating phages LKSleep, Shaolin, and RW to different temperatures, pH, and salt concentration environments. Each of these phages were isolated in differing conditions, with LKSleep and Shaolin from kitchen sponges and RW from sewage water, hence covering a wide range of host environments. We would like to investigate how stable these sets of phages are in a variety of conditions and what effects these changes have on infectivity. This will be performed through modification of the phage buffer by changing its chemical environment, via either addition of a reagent or change in incubation technique. This enables each phage buffer to be unique and provides us with variable sets of data to compare and contrast to our control group: a normal phage buffer. Data will be collected by way of plaque assays to observe levels of infectivity in different conditions. Our data at the end of our experiment leads us to conclude that modifying phage conditions greatly affect the transduction of phages into bacterial hosts.