K. Last 2008 BioMinds post

This semester has been a challenging one but full of growth. The investigation proposed new challenges. In the last few months time was spent troubleshooting. The second round of biopanning wasn’t yielding the accustomed results. The host culture wasn’t lysing completely as expected so I had to carried out to verify the results. Three rounds of the second biopanning round were carried out but all showed the same result: turbid host culture. In order to verify if there were phages but just not enough to lyse the entire culture or if no phages were amplified whatsoever the technique of phage plaque was used. The first phage plaque plates showed a concurrent lysis were the whole plate lysed and some colonies remained. A second phage plaque was done but this time using a series of dilutions to decrease the number of phages to observe plaques. In terms of PCR, a run was made using the phages from the first round of biopanning but nothing was amplified. The PCR will be repeated with the use of other primers.

The future goals for next semester is to finish the third round of biopanning and amplify the phages from the first and third round of biopanning by using PCR then sequence the phages’ genomes and identify the protein which will result to be the biomarker.