A26: Phage of Enlightenment: What Has Been Learned from the Isolation and Characterization of Bacteriophages of Microbacterium foliorum and Streptomyces lividans

First-year students in Miami University’s Microbiology 223 and 224 class are among participants at over 100 colleges and universities in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s SEA-PHAGES program. This program is aimed at providing young scientists with an opportunity to carry out discovery-based science. In MBI 223 in the fall 2022 semester, students collected soil and leaf samples in an effort to isolate new bacteriophages from the environment. Bacteriophages (phages) are viruses that infect bacteria and are the most abundant biological entities on Earth. Additionally, phages have potential uses in medicine as antibacterial agents, and understanding their genes and proteins can reveal important, unknown molecular mechanisms of regulation of gene expression. Characterization and genome analysis (in MBI 224) of a phage, dubbed Moleficent, that infects the soil bacterium Microbacterium foliorum revealed that it is related to about three dozen other known phages. This phage was revealed both by genome analysis and electron microscopy imaging at the Center for Advanced Imaging and Microscopy to be a podovirus, with a very short tail region. Students identified two genes with unusual characteristics, one of which appears to encode a baseplate protein, keeping the phage’s DNA inside its capsid head. Students also analyzed the genome of OnionKnight, a phage infecting the bacterium Streptomyces lividans that as isolated by students at Washington University that is not related to any known free-living phages, and are currently engaged in bioinformatic efforts to propose functions for many of these genes. We expect that the characterization of both these phages will result in a deeper understanding of biological processes, and promote a longstanding interest in collaborative scientific research among the students.

Author(s): Katie Oakes, Biology Major

Ian Collamer, Microbiology Major

Hayley Craycraft, Microbiology Major

Gunnar Frechette, Biology Major

Nick Hargett, Microbiology Major

Kavan Jackson, Microbiology Major

Lucy Jones, Microbiology Major

Mysidia Leff, Biology Major

Ava Loria, Biology Major

Meet Patel, Microbiology Major

Madelyn Soder, Biology Major

Liv Weintraut, Biology Major

Alex Wyckoff, Zoology Major

Katy Rusche, Microbiology Major

Advisor(s): Mitchell Balish, Department of Microbiology

Rebecca Balish, Department of Microbiology

Rachael Morgan-Kiss, Department of Microbiology

Kristina Gara, Department of Microbiology

Elyse Levenda, Department of Microbiology