Student Presenter(s): Jessica Wang and Anna Makedonska
Faculty Mentor: Bryan Gibb
School/College: Arts and Sciences, Old Westbury

Antibiotic resistance is a growing public health crisis as antibiotic treatment of bacterial infections grows less effective with bacteria becoming increasingly resistant. Citrobacter freundii is a member of the Enterobacteriaceae family, a group of Gram-negative facultative anaerobes that inhabit a wide variety of environments. C. freundii is a treatable opportunistic pathogen, but antibiotic-resistant strains are making infections more difficult to treat. Bacteriophages are viruses of bacteria that lyse the cells that they infect and are currently being investigated as a potential therapy for treating bacterial infections. We isolated two bacteriophages that infect C. freundii from wastewater. The phages have myovirus morphology and are extremely lytic against the host bacteria. The genome of one of the phages was refractive to restriction enzyme digestion, which may be due to the presence of DNA-modifying enzymes in the genome. The genomes of both phages were sequenced and found to be approximately 180 kb long. A comparative genomic investigation reveals that both phages are related, but other more closely related phages have been found, and additional investigation of the genome appears to show that these bacteriophages are reasonable candidates for phage therapy.