| dc.description.abstract | Recently there has been an increase in bacterial infections that are resistant to traditional
antibiotics. With this upward trend of resistance, many scientists are turning to
alternative treatments like phage therapeutics. In this report there is discussion of
isolating and characterizing novel phages of Rhodococcus equi and Burkholderia
cenocepacia. Burkholderia cenocepacia is part of the Burkholderia cepacia complex
(BCC), which causes pulmonary infections in cystic fibrosis patients (10). Rhodococcus
equi is an intracellular pathogen which invades the macrophages of
immunocompromised individuals such as young foals. While phylogenetically R. equi,
a Gram-positive bacterium, and Burkholderia, Gram-negative bacteria, are unrelated,
they both occupy the same ecological niche as soil saprophytes. Therefore, it is possible
to isolate novel phages from the soil for both of these bacteria. Using a soil enrichment
procedure, it has been possible to isolate and amplify 12 novel R. equi bacteriophages.
These bacteriophages all appear to have the same morphologies as siphophages and
similar genome sizes. Five of the R. equi phage genomes were pooled together with
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other bacteriophages and pyrosequenced using 454 LifeSciences Technology. These
phages are mosaic and sequencing traditional plasmid libraries were sufficient to
deconvolute the 454 data. Also reported is the complete genomic sequencing of
BcepNY3, a Burkholderia cenocepacia bacteriophage via a Whole Genome Shotgun
Approach. BcepNY3’s 47,382 bp genome was found to encode 70 proteins and 1 tRNA.
It was determined that BcepNY3 is part of the previously described Bcep781 family of
phages (26). Surprisingly, it is also related to the Xanthomonas oryzae phage OP2, and
proposed in this report is a possible evolutionary connection between OP2 and the
Bcep781 family of phages. | en |
