Thank you for your response. Yes! Typically, one would think that lytic phages, due to their nature of straight out killing the bacteria, would be most ideal in patient phage therapy, but that’s not necessarily the case. Temperate phages can be genetically modified to act like lytic phages and at times can be more effective in therapy treatments. There actually isn’t enough evidence or experimentation to conclude that one particular type (lytic or temperate), a family (siphoviridae, miroviridae, etc.), or cluster of phages is better for phage therapy than another. There’s a lot of research that is still necessary in order to safely conclude anything. Most phage research being done nowadays is actually centered around the exact question you had.
Thanks for the question. The closest possibility is cluster N, but in all honesty I’d need to conduct a lot more in depth research to get a definitive answer, as it was being quite finnicky in terms of amount of DNA we isolated in order to conduct the Restriction Digest and PCR.
Very well presented! If the phage website was not able to determine what cluster the phage was in, does that mean censored is a totally new kind of phage?
Thank you for your question. More than likely no. It would be more likely that Censored belongs to cluster N and requires another few PCRs in order to really tell which cluster it is a part of, but there is a chance that it could start it’s own ‘new’ cluster if it turns out it doesn’t belong to any, which would be quite interesting since it doesn’t happen very often. Censored is quite common in terms of type and family of phage, despite the lack of easy identification of cluster, but if you’re curious about very rare types of phages that are typically considered ‘new’ kinds, I would highly recommend looking up ‘corndog’ phages, which, well, look like corndogs. They’re incredibly rare to find. To give an example as to how rare, this semester not a single team found one. They’re found in one team maybe every three or four semesters.
Thank you for your response. I can’t really answer this question as in depth as I would like to, but I know it’s possible seeing as temperate phages can be genetically modified to suppress or remove the repressor protein (stops lysing of the cell) and the integrase protein (integrates phage DNA into bacterial genome), so I’m assuming CRISPR would be the way to do this. You would want this in order to have a temperate phage immediately enter the lytic cycle (to kill the bacteria) and to prevent the bacteria from gaining any resistance to the phage. Additionally, there are ways to use phages as ‘transporters’ for things like vaccines, like nano-doordashers in a way, but I’m not sure how this works. I hope this answers your question.
curesymposium.org 
Great job! Does the kind of phage affect the efficacy of a potential phage treatment?
LikeLike
Thank you for your response. Yes! Typically, one would think that lytic phages, due to their nature of straight out killing the bacteria, would be most ideal in patient phage therapy, but that’s not necessarily the case. Temperate phages can be genetically modified to act like lytic phages and at times can be more effective in therapy treatments. There actually isn’t enough evidence or experimentation to conclude that one particular type (lytic or temperate), a family (siphoviridae, miroviridae, etc.), or cluster of phages is better for phage therapy than another. There’s a lot of research that is still necessary in order to safely conclude anything. Most phage research being done nowadays is actually centered around the exact question you had.
LikeLike
Do you have any other predictions for what cluster your phage may belong to?
LikeLike
Thanks for the question. The closest possibility is cluster N, but in all honesty I’d need to conduct a lot more in depth research to get a definitive answer, as it was being quite finnicky in terms of amount of DNA we isolated in order to conduct the Restriction Digest and PCR.
LikeLike
Very well presented! If the phage website was not able to determine what cluster the phage was in, does that mean censored is a totally new kind of phage?
LikeLike
Thank you for your question. More than likely no. It would be more likely that Censored belongs to cluster N and requires another few PCRs in order to really tell which cluster it is a part of, but there is a chance that it could start it’s own ‘new’ cluster if it turns out it doesn’t belong to any, which would be quite interesting since it doesn’t happen very often. Censored is quite common in terms of type and family of phage, despite the lack of easy identification of cluster, but if you’re curious about very rare types of phages that are typically considered ‘new’ kinds, I would highly recommend looking up ‘corndog’ phages, which, well, look like corndogs. They’re incredibly rare to find. To give an example as to how rare, this semester not a single team found one. They’re found in one team maybe every three or four semesters.
LikeLike
Great job, how would CRISPR work with this phage? Sorry if that’s a big question.
LikeLike
Thank you for your response. I can’t really answer this question as in depth as I would like to, but I know it’s possible seeing as temperate phages can be genetically modified to suppress or remove the repressor protein (stops lysing of the cell) and the integrase protein (integrates phage DNA into bacterial genome), so I’m assuming CRISPR would be the way to do this. You would want this in order to have a temperate phage immediately enter the lytic cycle (to kill the bacteria) and to prevent the bacteria from gaining any resistance to the phage. Additionally, there are ways to use phages as ‘transporters’ for things like vaccines, like nano-doordashers in a way, but I’m not sure how this works. I hope this answers your question.
LikeLike