University Archives

Arthrobacteriophage Chicken is a bacteriophage, which is a virus that targets bacteria, using the host’s cells to replicate themselves and destroy the host cells. It was isolated from slightly dry, sandy soil collected from Los Angeles, California. Based on genomic similarity, Chicken has been classified to belong to the cluster AS1 and was isolated using the host Arthrobacter globiformis B-2979. This tells us that it has a shared evolutionary relationship and conserved genomic features among related phages. It has a temperate life cycle, where it can alternate between both the lytic and lysogenic cycles. This suggests the presence of regulatory genes involved in lysogeny, like integrases and repressors, which can be determined during annotation. The genome’s length is a total of 39,511 base pairs (bp). Its genome is now being annotated by students and faculty of the University of Detroit Mercy by employing various gene annotation tools, including PECAAN, PhagesDB, NCBI, DeepTMHMM, and HHPred Databases. These tools will allow us to compare proteins and analyze their structure in the open reading frames. Although currently we are in a preliminary process of annotating the genome of Chicken, we look forward to determining the functions of all 64 possible genes and finalizing our project. This work will contribute to the growing database of arthrobacteriophages and help to provide valuable information such as genome organization and evolutionary relationships.