Student Presenter(s): Ann Zhang, Salvatore DeMartino
Faculty Mentors: Bryan Gibb, Leonidas Salichos
Department: Biological and Chemical Sciences
School/College: College of Arts and Sciences, Long Island

Bacteriophages are recognized as the most abundant agents on Earth that infect and replicate only within bacterial cells. DNA Master is a genome annotation program that shows us phages at the gene level and we often utilize this to research their functions. Unlike other organisms, bacteriophages genomes are densely packed with genes due to space restrictions in the capsid, so it is unusual to find large regions of DNA that do not code for proteins in bacteriophages. Computational methods such as Glimmer and GeneMark provide automated gene predictions to give us a sense where each gene begins. Using these tools we can then calculate the gaps and overlaps between one gene's end and another's start. We noticed that Phage Eraser has a gap between Genes 42 and 43. A similar situation is also observed in evolutionarily similar phages such as Elizi, Phives, YesChef. Here we investigate this non-coding region for potential coding signals and characterize the surrounding genes. Bioinformatics plays an important role not only when exploring coding, but also when predicting non-coding or unknown regions as well.