Rationale

Today we will look more into our independent research project and hopefully discover a reason for why the %GC in AM cluster phages are significantly lower than that of Arthrobacter.

Procedure

• Each group member read a large portion of review articles to see if there was a reason why some bacteriophage %GC content was significantly lower than that of their host.
• We began to see if the trends were present in Arthrobacter using NCBI Blast, PhagesDB, and Phamerator

Results

We found from article reading that horizontal gene transfer is a large reason for why the %GC can differ between host bacteria and their bacteriophage. Lucy found that Staphylococcus had a reportedly low %GC and after using NCBI Blast, it was found that gene 97 in NapoleonB had a CDD hit for Staphylococcus. Gene 98 in Mudcat also had a hit.

Conclusions/Next Steps

Next, we will research more into horizontal gene transfer and if it played a role in the low %GC of other genes.