SEA-PHAGES Logo

The official website of the HHMI Science Education Alliance-Phage Hunters Advancing Genomics and Evolutionary Science program.

Abstract Summary

Below is a summary of the abstract you submitted. Presenting author(s) is shown in bold.

If any changes need to be made, you can modify the abstract or change the authors.

You can also download a .docx version of this abstract.

If there are any problems, please email Dan at dar78@pitt.edu and he'll take care of them!

This abstract was last modified on March 15, 2024 at 3:40 p.m..

Neumann University
Corresponding Faculty Member: Matthew Mastropaolo, mastropm@neumann.edu
This abstract WILL be considered for a talk.
Optimizing the Adsorption of Known Bacteriophage; JaimeB: A Comparative Study of Divalent and Monovalent Salts
Keyshla G Valentin Caban, Matthew D Mastropaolo

Calcium (a divalent cation) has been associated with successful adsorption properties of bacteriophage, which allows for a successful infection and replication within a bacterial cell. Divalent salts such as calcium can stabilize bacterial cell surfaces to facilitate the adsorption of bacteriophages. For this reason, calcium chloride is the most common additive in media to isolate, purify, and magnify bacteriophages which allows for phage reproduction. EE Cluster Microbacterium phage JaimeB was used as the basis to investigate the efficacy of CaCl2 in comparison to BaCl2, MgCl2, KCl, and NaCl. In a comparative study the efficacy was based on the number and size of plaques evaluated at a dilution of 10^-4. Calcium displayed the greatest number of plaques while the least number of plaques were seen in the samples with monovalent salts. Although calcium displayed the highest number of plaques all the salts tested showed plaque formation using both serial dilutions plaque assays along with pick a plaque procedure.