Team:British Columbia/Project Phage

Introduction

The goal of the Phage and Phage standard sub-team was to develop the new phage standard for submission to the BioBrick registry and to test the characteristics of the phage that would be used for our wet lab experiments.

The Wet-Lab Phage

Since our wet lab experiments were focusing on S. Aureus biofilms we had a finite list of phages to choose from. We originally chose to work with phage φMR11 since information on it's genome was readily available and it appeared to be the subject of current research. As the summer proceeded and requests for the phage did not materialize we move on to work on a different phage. We chose φ11, a prophage found in S. Aureus strain 8325 along with 2 other prophages. Plans proceeded with developing the phage standard as we attempted acquire both the original phage φMR11 and S. Aureus strain φ11.

The Phage Standard

The phage standard was spawned from the necessity of our plan to alter the 50 kilo base pair long genome of a phage. Developing the phage standard is a necessary step for iGEM and the BioBrick registry as a whole for several reasons.

• Every phage genome contains multiple instances of illegal cut sites
• Phage genomes are too large to be manipulated using normal BioBrick plasmids.
• Phages are inherently useful due to their specific nature and ability to insert DNA into bacterial genomes

Our phage standard solves the problem of phage genomes being too large, negate the problem of phage genomes containing multiple illegal cut sites and allows any lysogenic phage to be used as part of the BioBrick registry.

Approach

Results & Discussion