Abstract Rough Draft and Continued Research 4/17/19

Rationale

The rationale behind today in lab was to create a project outline to help guide the rest of our research and to help us begin to prepare for our final presentations. In addition, when we were done with our presentation outline, we continued working on sequencing and protein folding in order to collect the necessary data.

Tools/Procedure

1. Presentation outline was submitted
2. MEME Motif was used to find repeating motifs in the TMPs of selected proteins from each usable cluster

Results

The results above were generated using the MEME software to find motifs. The logo above represents a motif that was found in all 43 selected TMPs suggesting an area of conservation. In addition, when searching for other common motifs 2 appeared with much less frequency but much more similarity, which will require further research. This motif shows that there is less similarity in the actual amino acid sequences, but the color coding suggests that structure is more likely to be conserved as many of the amino acids at a location are color-coded the same, suggesting that the amino acids will behave very similarly.

Conclusion

This motif demonstrates that there is at least one conserved motif for all of the randomly selected phage tested, answering our guiding question that, at least to a small degree, there are shared similarities between all TMPs.

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. This motif needs to be further investigated, and I will see if I can find more motifs in all the proteins. I will also try to fold the amino acids found in just the motif to see if they are structurally similar to the sequences identified as the same motif.