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Poster Presentation

College of Engineering & Science

Awali, Hadi, Hadeel Bazzi, Leah Beraki, Hadi Hammoud, Khaled Nasher, Stephanie B Conant, Jonathan S Finkel, and Levi Storks. "Minor Tail Protein in Bacteriophage genome function."

Our bacteriophages rely on specialized structural proteins to successfully infect host bacteria, yet the specific functions of many minor tail proteins remain poorly understood. This project investigates the role of a predicted minor tail protein within a bacteriophage genome to better understand its contribution to phage structure and host interaction. Understanding these proteins is important because tail components are directly involved in host recognition, attachment, and DNA delivery. To answer our research question, we used PECAAN for our genome annotations. PECAAN uses different tools such as Glimmer, GeneMark, BLASTp, and PhagesDB. We analyzed the different coding potentials, start site selection, ribosome binding site scores, and sequence homology to identify the proteins. We compared our phage to similar phages using protein alignment to help determine the function of the genes. We also ensured that our start codon is the best start codon. Some results suggest that the annotated gene encodes a conserved minor tail protein based on strong coding potential, agreement between gene prediction tools, and significant homology to known tail proteins in other bacteriophages. The gene is located within a cluster of other structural genes which indicate its role in tail assembly. Overall, the results suggest that factors like gene length, conserved domains, and where the gene is in the genome are important clues for identifying structural proteins. Overall, our research shows the importance of genome annotation in predicting protein function and contributes to a broader understanding of bacteriophage morphology. In the future, we plan to modify our annotations, investigate structural modeling, and further explore how minor tail proteins affect host specificity and how that affects phage sensitivity.

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