Team:BYU Provo/Results/Modeling

Results Overview

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Experimental Results

Modeling Results

Parts Submitted

Basic Design

Experiments with bacteriophage growth is often performed either in liquid broth or in solid agar medium. In contrast to the relative uniform distribution of phages in liquid broth, phages form individual clearings in bacterial lawn within solid agar medium. These clearings are termed plaques. They are the product of bacterial cell lysis as phage replicate and spread outward.

For our modeling experiments, we hypothesized that multiple experimental factors may influence the size of plaque formation in solid agar medium (Fig. 1). We decided to start with identifying the relationships between plaque sizes and each individual factors. With these data, we can generate a mathematical model that take into account all experimental variability. Such model can be used by researcher to design the optimal experimental conditions that will produce plaques of the ideal size for their experiments.

Many experimental

A viral plaque is a visible structure formed within a cell culture, such as bacterial cultures within some nutrient medium (e.g. agar). The bacteriophage viruses replicate and spread, thus generating regions of cell destructions known as plaques.

A plaque is developed as a part of infection of one cell by a single virus particle that is followed by the replication of that virus, and finally, the death of the cell. The newly replicated virus particles will later infect and then kill surrounding cells.

Cholera Team