Characterization of Red Pigment Producing Bacteria: An Honors Project
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This is a continuation of a project submitted as an Honors Proposal in April of 2019. The project focuses on five bacterial strains that are capable of producing both a red pigment and a green sheen on Marine Agar. The project was intended to further classify these organisms, through several experiments that originally included a carbohydrate utilization test, an Analytical Profile Index (API), determination of fatty acid composition, examining morphology, multi-locus sequence comparison, and/or comparing the absorption spectra. Since then, the project has switched gears and become more focused on genomic comparison. The five protein sequences studied were Filamenting temperature-sensitive mutant Z (FtsZ), Glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate A (GapA), RecA, RNA Polymerase A (RpoA), and Topoisomerase A (TopA). An attempt was made to isolate the sequences of each of the five genes in the following organisms: MI3, JD-17, JD-18, Renegade, and Little Penny. Unfortunately, the project was cut short due to lab closures in response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, and the only isolates sequenced were RecA, RpoA, TopA and 16s isolated from MI3. These sequences were compared to the known sequences of the genes from two strains of Zooshikella ganghwensis (15267 and JC2044) and one strain of Hahella chejuensis.