Literature Search Report 4/8/19

Rationale

The rationale behind today in lab was to search the literature to help us better understand what we are researching and to see if we can find valuable insights. In addition, when we were done with our literature search, we continued working on sequencing and protein folding in order to collect the necessary data.

Tools/Procedure

1. Five sources of primary literature were cited and submitted
2. Clustal Omega was used to compare TMPs between individual Arthrobacter clusters and between different tail morphologies
   1. AK, AL, AM, and all F clusters were compared

Results

The clustal omega results shown above help illustrate the results that were found during this lab period. While there is an incredible similarity between TMPs of the same cluster, even TMPs from the same tail morphology, but different clusters show fairly significant differences in the amino acid sequences. However, there does seem to be more similarity between the types of amino acids (as seen by the color coding) suggesting that even if DNA or amino acid sequences are not highly conserved, the structure is more likely to be conserved.

Conclusion

While there is not enough data to make extensive conclusions yet, our data so far suggests that TMPs are highly conserved (based on amino acid sequences) in each cluster, and less conserved in the tail families. The amino acid sequences do however suggest certain structural elements being conserved even if the amino acid sequence is not strictly conserved.

Future Plans

In the future, we will continue to look for similarities and difference in the amino acid while continuing our folding of proteins to try to figure out if there are key conserved regions in TMPs.