Isolating Tricson
From soil samples, I isolated a new phage on the host Gordonia terrae and named it Tricson, combining my lab partner’s name and mine. I purified it through repeated rounds of single-plaque picking, amplified it on webbed plates, and produced a filtered high-titer lysate of 2×10¹⁰ PFU/mL, well above the 1×10⁸ PFU/mL needed for whole-genome sequencing.
Annotating Starburst
Starburst is a cluster CT phage (host Gordonia rubripertincta, 46,478 bp). I annotated genes 11 to 15: a head-to-tail stopper, a hypothetical protein, a tail terminator, the major tail protein, and a tail assembly chaperone. I chose each start site with GeneMark, Glimmer, Starterator, and gap/overlap analysis, and assigned functions with BLAST and HHpred.