GG
Gunnar Goetz
  • Mathematics
  • Class of 2020
  • Stoughton, WI

Stoughton student presents research at seventh annual Celebration of Scholars event

2017 May 2

Carthage College held the seventh annual Celebration of Scholars event on Friday, April 28, 2017. Celebration of Scholars is a poster exhibition that features original research, scholarship, and creative work completed by Carthage students.

Gunnar Goetz of Stoughton presented "An In-Depth Analysis of the Singleton: Gordonia Phage Apricot" at the event.

This is the project's abstract:

"Our research focuses on the annotation and characterization of the singleton bacteriophage Apricot. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect a bacterial host in order to utilize the cellular machinery of a bacterium to reproduce. Apricot is one of 80 bacteriophages discovered during the fall of 2016 at Carthage college. Multiple laboratory techniques were used to isolate these phages and determine plaque and phage morphology including plaque assays and electron microscopy. Apricot is a siphoviridae that infects the bacterial host Gordonia terrae, which is a soil bacteria related to Mycobacteria species. After DNA extraction, Apricot's genomic DNA was sent to HMMI for DNA sequencing, and it was found to be a singleton indicating that it has little similarity to other sequenced phages and represents a novel genome. The genomic sequence has been processed through the DNA annotation program DNAmaster. The functions of Apricot's gene products were bioinformatically determined using databases online, including BLASTp, HHpred, Phamerator, and Phagesdb. These databases provided comparisons between Apricot's protein coding genes and the protein coding genes of other organisms. Further characterization of Apricot is being performed using bioinformatic analysis and laboratory techniques to examine this unique Gordonia phage."