In the past week, our group investigated looking for attP sites in our genome but we started to run into complications. First, the attP sites for Arthrobacter are not known so we resorted to running the entire genome through BLAST to find similar conserved sequences compared against the entire Arthrobacter taxa. Surprisingly, even after changing search parameters, few similar sequences were found and none had good e-values. We were looking for short, highly conserved (near 100% identity) sequences but they were not found.

We even considered the possibility that Amigo is not actually an Arthobacter phage and ran it against all kinds of categories – micrococcinae (the family Arthrobacter belongs to), etc., and yet, we still couldn’t find anything with significant similarity. This made it near impossible for us to continue with this particular project so we ended up switching last Wednesday to a new and more doable project. Although it was a little frustrating to hit a dead-end twice, we are confident that we learned a lot from it and that our new project shows a lot of potential.