NOMADIC ADVENTURES
Throughout the summer of my freshman year and well into my sophomore year, I was responsible for annotating the genomes of BobaPhett and JangoPhett (below), the two bacteriophages that I had discovered during my freshman year. Through bioinformatics research, I was able to characterize my two bacteriophages by assigning functionality and legitimacy to each of the genes.
In order to assign these functions, I used several different databases and the information compiled on those sites to determine the best function served by these genes. It's important to note that these databases already have algorithms to suggest the best choice based on e-values and the conservation % found within the same cluster bacteriophages however, other factors including coding potential aren't accounted for. This is where we come in, as a biologist and as a scientist, to find importance in going over what a computer algorithm might have missed during the initial screening process so that we may have no doubt in backing these decisions. The databases/networks I utilized were Phamerator, Phages DB, HHPRED, NCBI BLAST, PECAAN, GeneMark, DNA Master, and Aragorn (only for BobaPhett).
As a result, I was able to successfully assign 40 gene functions to the 101 genes in JangoPhett and 65 gene functions to the 106 genes in BobaPhett. At this point, I am still waiting to the quality control results of my findings and hope that once it is approved, the annotations will be added into GenBank for other scientists to use the information accordingly!
* I've condensed the methods and the explanations greatly so if you're curious or have any questions, my email is on the about me page!*