You did a very good job going through the methods and what experiments you did! I think that your poster was a little bit wordy. It was very filled so maybe just making your abstract and intro a little bit more concise.
Yes, many different clusters can be good for phage therapy besides the A3 sub cluster. One of the most important characteristics that determines if a phage will be good for phage therapy is whether it is lytic or lysogenic and different sub clusters can contain both of these types of phages within them.
I thought your presentation and your poster were great. I was curious about the next steps for your phage. What would you have to do next to determine if your phage is worthy of being used to treat bacterial infections?
In order to determine if our phage is able to treat a bacterial infection, we would first have to test our phage on the specific bacteria we are trying to target in order to make sure it is able to infect it. We would then need to ensure that it is efficient at infecting it or could be used in conjunction with other phages in a phage cocktail.
Once our phage’s genome is sequenced, we would then be able to use the program Phamerator to compare our phage’s genome to other phages known to be within the A3 subcluster. This would show us which regions of the genome are similar and allow us to use synteny in order to make predictions about the function of certain genes within our phage’s genome.
One of the limitations of our research was that we were only able to go into the lab twice a week which limited the number experiments we were able to conduct and prevented us from doing multiple experiments in order to confirm our sub cluster hypothesis. We were also only able to conduct a restriction digest and PCR experiment in order to make a hypothesis about which cluster our phage was in, and we are not able to confirm this without actually sequencing our phage’s genome. Looking back, I’m not sure that there is anything we would have done differently besides perform more experiments in order to confirm our results.
You did a very good job going through the methods and what experiments you did! I think that your poster was a little bit wordy. It was very filled so maybe just making your abstract and intro a little bit more concise.
Are there any other phage sub clusters that are good for phage therapy?
Yes, many different clusters can be good for phage therapy besides the A3 sub cluster. One of the most important characteristics that determines if a phage will be good for phage therapy is whether it is lytic or lysogenic and different sub clusters can contain both of these types of phages within them.
I thought your presentation and your poster were great. I was curious about the next steps for your phage. What would you have to do next to determine if your phage is worthy of being used to treat bacterial infections?
In order to determine if our phage is able to treat a bacterial infection, we would first have to test our phage on the specific bacteria we are trying to target in order to make sure it is able to infect it. We would then need to ensure that it is efficient at infecting it or could be used in conjunction with other phages in a phage cocktail.
In your second future directions point, what methods would you use to compare this phage to others?
Once our phage’s genome is sequenced, we would then be able to use the program Phamerator to compare our phage’s genome to other phages known to be within the A3 subcluster. This would show us which regions of the genome are similar and allow us to use synteny in order to make predictions about the function of certain genes within our phage’s genome.
Did you have any limitations to your research? And would you do anything differently looking back?
One of the limitations of our research was that we were only able to go into the lab twice a week which limited the number experiments we were able to conduct and prevented us from doing multiple experiments in order to confirm our sub cluster hypothesis. We were also only able to conduct a restriction digest and PCR experiment in order to make a hypothesis about which cluster our phage was in, and we are not able to confirm this without actually sequencing our phage’s genome. Looking back, I’m not sure that there is anything we would have done differently besides perform more experiments in order to confirm our results.