Mycobacteriophage Cheetobro, discovered on the Hampden-Sydney campus and named by Drew Whitt ’11 and analyzed by James Hughes ’14 and Francis Polakiewicz ’14, was recently published on GenBank.  GenBank is the genomic sequence repository of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), a subsidiary of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Cheetobro joins Arturo as the second mycobacteriophage sequence published through the work of Hampden-Sydney students in conjunction with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Science Education Alliance-Phage Hunters Exploring Genomics and Evolutionary Science (SEA-PHAGES) program, a collaboration between HHMI and ~80 American colleges and universities across the country.  This fall, a new crop of students will enter the program through the Biology Department’s Molecular and Cellular Biology class and will work with bacterial hosts from genus Bacillus to further contribute to understanding virus evolution.

The link to Cheetobro may be found at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/670140156

See the complete collection of mycobacteriophages isolated at Hampden-Sydney at: http://phagesdb.org/institutions/HMSD/

Electron micrograph of mycobacteriophage Cheetobro