Abstract

In a modern era where bacterial infections are increasingly difficult to treat due to increasing antibiotic resistance, bacteriophages pose a tentative “natural” treatment for such tenacious microbes. Bacteriophages are part of a diverse subcategory of viruses that specifically infect bacteria, each infecting a particular range of bacterial hosts. There has been extensive interest in these infectious particles in the last decade due to their therapeutic potential, evolutionary machinery and speed, and as genetic devices. Mycobacteriophages are one of the most studied subclassifications of phage because of the ability of some to infect Mycobacterium tuberculosis, a gram-positive bacteria that is pathogenic to humans and increasingly drug-resistant. However, recent studies have branched past mycobacteriophage to other genera such as Arthrobacter, Bacillus, Rhodococcus, and others that may have medical or environmental interest. This research project sought to isolate, characterize, and research phages infecting Rhodococcus erythropolis, a common soil bacterium. Several novel phages were isolated from soil samples in the Midwest and are currently being purified. After the purification process, the phages’ morphologies and characteristics will be analyzed using various assays.  Furthermore the DNA will be extracted for sequencing, which allows for gene assignment (annotation) and further research based on those annotations.  This research project is significant in that Rhodococcus bacteriophages are rarely described in the literature, despite their potential in soil microbial ecology.  Beyond that, Rhodococcus bacteria are related to Mycobacteria, therefore bacteriophage that infect them may be able to infect pathogenic strains of Mycobacteria.  Also, the phage database is further expanded by discovering phages from other bacterial species, which allows for comparison between characteristics, host ranges, and application potential of the phage world.