Did you know that IA has had a thriving bacteriophage discovery program for five years? It’s true, and in those five years IA students discovered 17 new bacteriophages that infect a bacterial host called Mycobacterium smegmatis. M. smegmatis is not pathogenic but is a close cousin to tuberculosis and leprosy. Bacteriophage viruses only infect bacteria and are specific to bacterial types. The hope of any phage program is to find viruses that could potentially be used as therapy for bacterial infections. This is currently important due to increased antimicrobial resistance around the world. The phage program at IA started as a DNA Club project and this year it was incorporated into Biotechnology Applications as a biotechnology unit. So far around 50 students have participated in the program.

In our program, students’ culture and purify phages from soil. Once purified, the phages are sent to the University of Georgia for electron microscopy imaging so students can be the first people to ever see their phage. Students name their phages and then they are sent to the University of Pittsburg for inclusion to their phage library for pathogen testing. 

One of our phages has gotten special treatment. Bridget Flynn and Anish Kelam discovered “Twigg” in 2023. Since then they have extracted genomic DNA of the phage and had it sequenced. Currently they are assembling the 86 genes in the genome and discovering what each gene is used for by the phage.

Twigg and the other phages can be found at www.pgahesdb.org . Our list of named phages include: Starbird, NidhiAgamemnon, CasaBonita, Nandi, Lagos, Gothmog, Kuhnbeam18, Silvia1949, Kitty67, Rocky24, Kuhnquorer, Iris212, HumptyDumpty, MrSquiggles, Sapphire, MajorBubba.

HumpyDumpty