That’s a really good question! If the protein is part of juxtracrine signaling, which I suspect it is, doing a loss of function mutation of this protein and a plaque assay may help us determine this. Past research that I found showed that losing these proteins actually lowers the infection rate of the bacteriophage dramtically.
Based off of your future directions do you think taking gene 36 and putting it in a non A2 would affect it’s function overall not just in it’s possible role of infection?
It depends on where this gene is inserted. If it was placed over coding regions in the genome of a non A2 phage, this definitely would affect the phages viability, but say if it was added to the circularized DNA of a phage without placing over any genes, this would most likely not affect the phages ability to assemble.
That is what we are trying to figure out in Phage lab 2! Unfortunately, we can only asign function to genes based off of programs like NCBI-BLAST, HHpred, and Phamerator, so it is found more time than not that a gene will come up with no known function (NKF)
What does the full crystallization of protein 36, mentioned in the future directions, entail?
A big portion of how we can determine protein function is by getting a 3D model of the actual protein itself. Great question!
What result from your future experiment would possibly allow you to determine if gene 36 is a transmembrane protein or a ligand?
That’s a really good question! If the protein is part of juxtracrine signaling, which I suspect it is, doing a loss of function mutation of this protein and a plaque assay may help us determine this. Past research that I found showed that losing these proteins actually lowers the infection rate of the bacteriophage dramtically.
Based off of your future directions do you think taking gene 36 and putting it in a non A2 would affect it’s function overall not just in it’s possible role of infection?
It depends on where this gene is inserted. If it was placed over coding regions in the genome of a non A2 phage, this definitely would affect the phages viability, but say if it was added to the circularized DNA of a phage without placing over any genes, this would most likely not affect the phages ability to assemble.
What role does this gene play in the function of bacteriophage?
That is what we are trying to figure out in Phage lab 2! Unfortunately, we can only asign function to genes based off of programs like NCBI-BLAST, HHpred, and Phamerator, so it is found more time than not that a gene will come up with no known function (NKF)