Team:BYU Provo/Notebook

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Phage Team

Large Phage Team

Bryan Merrill and Keltzie Westra

The focus of the Large Phage team is to make a cross section of phage sizes through the mutagenesis of T4 bacteriophage. Our main area of research was in making T4's already large capsid even larger, while maintaining phenotypic stability. This was done by taking the isolated large phage and observing there later generations to ensure that their phenotype is inherited.

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Small Phage Team

Xiuqi (Jade) Li and LJ Perry

We are creating a library of different size T7 bacteriophage capsids. This is accomplished by mutating the phage with a base analog and then isolating the smaller and bigger T7 phages. We are also establishing the relationship between the capsid size and the plaque size of certain phages.

Phage Purification Team

Amber Brown, Arick Christopher, and Darren Lasko

As members of the phage purification group, we focus on the purification of bacteriophages and the preparation of ghost capsids. We have worked with several different methods of preparation and can manipulate the procedures to accommodate the type of phage and the capsid size of the mutants.

Cholera Team

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Cholera-Detection Team

Clarice Harrison, Kendall Kiser, and Kelton Peck

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Our focus is two-fold: 1) develop a system in E.coli to detect the presence V. cholerae, and 2) integrate E.coli bacteriophage lambda into a biofilm-degrading machine that is moderated by our detection system. We continued work that last year's iGEM team began on cloning cholera's quorum-sensing circuit into a "superplasmid," but upon discovering experimentally that bacteriophage lambda can naturally sense cholera, our later research efforts center synthetically improving this pathway.

Cholera-Enzyme Team

Nathan Sabin and Michael Schellhous

On the Cholera-Enzyme team our focus is researching enzymes that will degrade the V. cholerae biofilm. Our goal is to find enzymes that have potential to degrade the biofilm, isolate them, clone them into E. coli, and design an assay to test their biofilm-degrading ability.