Good question! We don’t really know yet but there are a few things have been shown to have an effect on lysogeny. Bacteriophage are much more ‘basic’ entities than their hosts and so they are more vulnerable to environmental factors like pH, salinity, temp, UV etc. since they are essentially just a protein capsule and DNA. Their genetic material is relatively vulnerable compared to bacterial/archaea or Eukaryotic DNA.
Also since they are mostly made of protein and DNA, availability of phosphates (or phosphorus in general) needs to be high in order to produce all the protein and DNA/RNA for the next generation of phage, so this could be a factor in the lyosgenic decision.
Because of this, the inside of their host is a much better environment than outside of it in a lot of cases, and so lysogeny is very useful. They still get to replicate their DNA as their host replicates and they’ll have more success when they switch back to the lytic cycle.
To be honest my partner added that part and I’m not sure how you would go about making a superphage that can infect a range of hosts. I also don’t think it would be very beneficial for phage therapy, as the specificity of phage when infecting hosts is one of the pros compared to antibiotics, so that our beneficial bacteria aren’t wiped out along with the disease causing species.
Great job! What are the potential impacts of future research? What do you hope to find and what would this information do for the bigger picture of phage research?
Thanks! The main goal of this project was to describe a new candidate for use in phage therapy, and bolstering the phage database will make bacteriophage therapy more viable in the future.
Specifically on our phage, we should run PCR experiments with different cluster primers to narrow down where Elgyem sits on the phage phylogeny. We should also reisolate our DNA to get better quality for sequencing, as that can be very useful in determining how a phage will fair against a certain host.
But some future research I think should be done on phage in general is research on how the tail fiber proteins determine host specificity. This info could be used in potential genetic modification of phages, and allow us to design phage to be able to infect a specific host. A larger database helps here too, especially ones that have been sequenced (though our DNA was too low quality for sequencing).
I think the potential of phage is huge in fighting bacterial infection, especially because they have the ability to evolve which will slow down/prevent bacteria from developing total resistance to them like they can with antibiotics. But if we were able to control that evolutionary process through gene modification, phage therapy becomes much more powerful.
To be honest, my partner added that part and I’m not sure why we’d do mutagenesis over looking at different phage candidates, or using more specific gene editing techniques.
curesymposium.org 
What was your hypothesis?
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We hypothesized that our phage belonged to either the K or N cluster of phage
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What conditions might a temperate phage wait for to return to the lytic cycle?
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Good question! We don’t really know yet but there are a few things have been shown to have an effect on lysogeny. Bacteriophage are much more ‘basic’ entities than their hosts and so they are more vulnerable to environmental factors like pH, salinity, temp, UV etc. since they are essentially just a protein capsule and DNA. Their genetic material is relatively vulnerable compared to bacterial/archaea or Eukaryotic DNA.
Also since they are mostly made of protein and DNA, availability of phosphates (or phosphorus in general) needs to be high in order to produce all the protein and DNA/RNA for the next generation of phage, so this could be a factor in the lyosgenic decision.
Because of this, the inside of their host is a much better environment than outside of it in a lot of cases, and so lysogeny is very useful. They still get to replicate their DNA as their host replicates and they’ll have more success when they switch back to the lytic cycle.
If you wanna learn more here’s a good paper on the subject: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/14/9/1904
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how would you start making a phage into a superphage?
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To be honest my partner added that part and I’m not sure how you would go about making a superphage that can infect a range of hosts. I also don’t think it would be very beneficial for phage therapy, as the specificity of phage when infecting hosts is one of the pros compared to antibiotics, so that our beneficial bacteria aren’t wiped out along with the disease causing species.
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how would you go about turning a phage into a superphage?
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Great job! What are the potential impacts of future research? What do you hope to find and what would this information do for the bigger picture of phage research?
LikeLike
Thanks! The main goal of this project was to describe a new candidate for use in phage therapy, and bolstering the phage database will make bacteriophage therapy more viable in the future.
Specifically on our phage, we should run PCR experiments with different cluster primers to narrow down where Elgyem sits on the phage phylogeny. We should also reisolate our DNA to get better quality for sequencing, as that can be very useful in determining how a phage will fair against a certain host.
But some future research I think should be done on phage in general is research on how the tail fiber proteins determine host specificity. This info could be used in potential genetic modification of phages, and allow us to design phage to be able to infect a specific host. A larger database helps here too, especially ones that have been sequenced (though our DNA was too low quality for sequencing).
I think the potential of phage is huge in fighting bacterial infection, especially because they have the ability to evolve which will slow down/prevent bacteria from developing total resistance to them like they can with antibiotics. But if we were able to control that evolutionary process through gene modification, phage therapy becomes much more powerful.
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Why did you choose mutagenesis as your next experiment in your future directions?
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To be honest, my partner added that part and I’m not sure why we’d do mutagenesis over looking at different phage candidates, or using more specific gene editing techniques.
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