The Fall 2014 Molecular and Cellular Biology class at Hampden-Sydney has been an active participant in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute SEA-PHAGES program, isolating and characterizing viruses that infect Bacillus bacteria as part of a nationwide project on viral evolution and genomics.  As part of this class experience, 5 students from the class prepared research presentations for the James Madison University “Phage Phaire”, a gathering of research students from James Madison, Virginia Commonwealth University, Old Dominion University, the University of Mary Washington, and Hampden-Sydney.  These 5 schools are part of the current 74-member nationwide HHMI SEA-PHAGES alliance and organize two research meetings per year to provide students with the chance to share their work with their peers.

Travis Goodloe ’16 presents his work on BlakeE, a phage of Bacillus cereus discovered on the H-SC campus.

Spencer Wiles ’15 presenting his work on Bacillus thuringiensis phage LargeMarge

Will Banning ’15 with his work on B. thuringiensis page Precious (co-doscovered with Mitch Cavallarin ’15)

Tucker Hudgins ’15 presenting phage TuckHudge to Phage Phaire keynote speaker Dr. Daniel Nelson of the University of Maryland-College Park

Dr. Lucia Barker of HHMI leans about phage Mavro from Corey Mavromatis ’16

Travis Goodloe ’16 received an award at the event for the best organized and designed poster from among all students, while Spencer Wiles ’15 received recognition for the meetings favorite phage name with “LargeMarge”.  The class will continue to work on characterizing their phages as the semester draws to a close and genomic sequences from the collected phages will be analyzed by H-SC students via bioinformatics.

Team H-SC with Mr. Madison on the JMU campus