Excellent job explaining your research! One question that I had for you is whether or not you were surprised by the results that you found. Based on your presentation you were able to determine the type of phage and confirm your prediction, but was there anything from the PCR and gels that you ran that surprised you or made it more difficult to interpret your results?
I think one of the most difficult result to interpret was the restriction digest result, because there was not a lot of DNA so the bands were very faint and the cuts were hard to see making the predictions of the cluster a little difficult.
Did all of our results complement each other? In other words, did the plaques along with the PCR readings confirm the data that you all found, or was there anything that contributed to an outlier?
Not necessarily! Phages are very specific in the host cells they are capable of infecting so regardless of the phage being lytic or temperate it will still have only a select few viable host bacterium. They are more infective, because they will immediately lyse the cell preventing the bacteria cell from reproducing.
Our results pretty much complemented each other all the way through the project. The one situation where the results did not match was the restriction digest bands were very faint, which was not consistent with the very bright band of our quality control test of our DNA.
M. smegmatis was used because it is closely related to other mycobacteria that do cause serious infection in humans such as M. tuberculosis, which causes the infection tuberculosis which can be very serious for patients dude to its high amount of antibiotic resistance. The goal would be to to possibly use a phage that can infect M. smegmatis and test it’s infection capability with some of these other pathogenic bacteria to be used as a possible phage therapy.
curesymposium.org 
Excellent job explaining your research! One question that I had for you is whether or not you were surprised by the results that you found. Based on your presentation you were able to determine the type of phage and confirm your prediction, but was there anything from the PCR and gels that you ran that surprised you or made it more difficult to interpret your results?
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I think one of the most difficult result to interpret was the restriction digest result, because there was not a lot of DNA so the bands were very faint and the cuts were hard to see making the predictions of the cluster a little difficult.
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Did all of our results complement each other? In other words, did the plaques along with the PCR readings confirm the data that you all found, or was there anything that contributed to an outlier?
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Great presentation! Because the lytic phage replicates itself, does this make it more versatile in killing different bacteria than other phages?
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Great presentation! Because the lytic phage replicates itself, does this make it more versatile in killing different bacteria than other phages?
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Not necessarily! Phages are very specific in the host cells they are capable of infecting so regardless of the phage being lytic or temperate it will still have only a select few viable host bacterium. They are more infective, because they will immediately lyse the cell preventing the bacteria cell from reproducing.
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Our results pretty much complemented each other all the way through the project. The one situation where the results did not match was the restriction digest bands were very faint, which was not consistent with the very bright band of our quality control test of our DNA.
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Great poster! Why was the m. smegmatis used as the target bacteria in this experiment?
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M. smegmatis was used because it is closely related to other mycobacteria that do cause serious infection in humans such as M. tuberculosis, which causes the infection tuberculosis which can be very serious for patients dude to its high amount of antibiotic resistance. The goal would be to to possibly use a phage that can infect M. smegmatis and test it’s infection capability with some of these other pathogenic bacteria to be used as a possible phage therapy.
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