Biology 107 Spring 2021 Lab Week 6 Discussion Topic Phages as Tools Question 1 One application of phages is to quickly detect the presence of food borne pathogenic bacteria in food As an example a microbiologist working for Chobani takes two batches of yogurt off of the production line She suspects that one yogurt sample is contaminated with Listeria a common food borne pathogen while the other one may or may not be contaminated A The scientist takes an extract from the contaminated yogurt sample and adds 1000 Listeria specific virus particles After shaking and incubation for a day what will happen to the number of phage particles in the sample Why Is this experiment selective for Listeria or could other bacteria lead to false positive results There be more phage will reproduce B Based on your answer to Part A how could the scientist tell if the second yogurt sample was contaminated with either Listeria or with E coli another potentially pathogenic bacterial species Less virus particles Question 2 2 Phage therapy is an alternative to antibiotic treatment for bacterial infections In phage therapy phages specific to pathogenic bacteria are delivered to the site of an infection e g on wound dressings by oral ingestion through an IV A One side effect of antibiotic treatment is that these chemicals kill many beneficial bacteria in the human gut Why might phage therapy for example to combat a Listeria infection in the gut be superior Superior B One problem with antibiotics is that they are typically unstable and quickly degrade in the body resulting in the need for frequent high doses during treatment What advantage would phage therapy have over antibiotic treatments in this respect Only need one doze of phage because they have the ability to multiply Question 3 A hypothetical situation A bacteriophage discovered by a student in the SEA PHAGES program shows very strong infectivity of its bacterial host it kills them quickly in culture The genome of this phage is in the Phages Database and it has been annotated Based on your growing understanding of comparing phage genomes if you wanted to determine which other annotated phages that infect the same bacterial host might also kill this host effectively but you could only test a small number of phages provided by the phage archives what could you do to help you narrow down the pool of candidate phages to request for testing Compare to other genes Prosocial 5 Spring 2021
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