8 thoughts on “P79 – Hurley

  1. The presentation was great! You discussed moving away from antibiotics and instead using phage therapy. Does phage therapy only kill some bacteria or will it lyse any type of bacteria?

    1. So each phage is specific to a bacteria. Usually in the phage sub cluster they can lyse the same bacteria but phages from different clusters might not be able to lyse the same bacteria. So yes phage therapy can only kill some bacteria it just depends what phages are being used and what bacteria is being used.

  2. What were your methods in regards to this experiment? Specifically, what worked best and what did you find to not work so well?

    1. So we first started with a plaque assay so we could isolate a specific phage. After we isolated a specific phage we did DNA isolation to get the DNA of our specific phage. Then we did a high titer with serial dilutions to see what the high titer lysate was. We then did restriction digest using the enzymes shown above to see how many cuts each enzyme did to know what our possible cluster would be. We lastly did PCR which was used to amplify our DNA and to confirm what cluster was. The experiment that was the hardest and I have had to re do was the PCR. It wasn’t the hardest but for some reason none of our bands showed up. Even other experiment I only had to do once. They all worked well though other than PCR.

  3. Good!
    Do you think Anti-pops would have the potential to be used in any kind of therapeutics? why or why not?

    1. I believe it could but the problem is that it is a temperate so it will be a bit harder to do because it could enter into lysogeny. We could fix that problem by taking out the repressor protein. It could possibly be used in phage therapy but we would have to figure out what bacteria it would lyse.

  4. Great presentation! Does the cluster of the phage determine how useful it will be in something like antibacterial treatment?

    1. It somewhat does. Usually, the phages that are in the same sub cluster can lyse the same bacteria so it could possibly (but most likely) kill the same bacteria. Also since it is temperate that plays a huge role since it can enter into lysogeny. But we can change that by removing the repressor protein.

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