Genes Involved in Lysogenic Lifecycle of Lysogen Precious 2A

Antibiotic resistance has become a growing concern in the medical setting. As bacteriophage, or phage, are nature made killers of bacteria they are useful in treating infections. Traditionally lytic phage are the only ones used for therapy. However, since the majority of phage can form lysogens it proves advantageous to study these organisms. A lysogen occurs when a bacteriophage, or phage, integrates its genome into the genome of the bacterial cell it is infecting. This is called the lysogenic cycle. The bacteriophage will sit in the bacterial cell until the cell becomes stressed. This triggers the phage to exit lysogeny and go into the lytic cycle when it will take over the cell to make more of itself. We want to study what genes are turned on and when during the process of exiting lysogeny. We are currently studying what genes are turned on and off while the lysogen is sitting in an unstressed bacterial cell. We are using a lysogen named Precious 2A that was created using the Arthrobacter bacteriophage Basilisk discovered in 2021. Genes hypothesized to play a role in lysogeny exit are expected to be located near lysogeny maintenance genes in the genome. Preliminary data have indicated that a majority of genes are not expressed during lysogeny of unstressed cells. Learning more about this process could help lead to understanding the function of unknown genes in Basilisk and other similar phage’s genomes.