Genome Sequence and Annotation of the B3 Mycobacteriophage Phayeta

Mycobacteriophage Phayeta was extracted from soil near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina using Mycobacterium smegmatis as a host. Annotation of the 68,700 base-pair circularly permuted genome identified 104 predicted protein-encoding genes, 34 of which have functional assignments. This article was published Open Access through the CCU Libraries Open Access Publishing Fund. The article was first published in Microbiology Resource Announcements: https://doi.org/10.1128/MRA.00915-2

The Importance of Processing and Understanding Bacteriophages

There are many bacteria that are increasingly becoming antibiotic resistant resulting in a new prevalent medical issue. Bacteriophages are evolutionary virus weapons that infect and fight against these infectious bacteria that give rise to Bacteriophages the most abundant biological entity found in nature, outnumbering all life combined, with a total estimated population of 1031. As part of BIOL 302L - Phage Discovery, we focused on identifying phages from individually collected soil samples found regionally in South Carolina. Through a series of experiments, we were able to identify and amplify two newly discovered phages that infect Mycobacterium Smegmatis following the protocols on the Actinobacteriophage Database: phage Phayeta and phage GrecoEtereo. As we discovered our phages, we are currently coding our sequences through bioinformatic techniques and platforms. We work extensively to try and translate every single gene that is coded through the Phage Database, GeneMark, DNA master, and Phamerator. All these platforms are essential to understand what we are looking at, and how to identify the genes and their purpose. It is our mission to understand the genetic purpose of our phage, and how this phage can be useful in implementing it within modern medicine fields or phage therapy treatments