Well, not YOUR DNA...
If you've been phage hunting with a host that's IN the order Actinomycetales, but is NOT Mycobacterium smegmatis mc2 155, the Hatfull lab would like to sequence your phages' genomes free of charge. So that means if you have DNA for phages found on Rhodococcus, Arthrobacter, Streptomyces, Gordonia, or a non-smeg Mycobacterium, we'll take them and sequence as many of them as we can until our budget runs out.
That means if you have a section where each of your 16 students found, for example, an Arthrobacter phage, we might be able to get each of them their own genome sequence to work on in the spring!
Seriously?
Yeah. We're excited to have our new Illumina MiSeq machine up and running, and due to some recent drops in the costs of certain reagents, we think we can possibly sequence as many as 200 of these "alternative host" phages this academic year. We can't guarantee that every DNA sample you send us will get sequenced, but we're going to do our best. So please send us what you've got!
Imagine the dent we can make together in understanding the diversity of the phages of these new hosts!
How?
Just email me (dar78@pitt.edu) if you're planning on sending us some extra samples this year. You can send them anytime, or wait until the November 21 deadline for submitting DNA samples. If you have general questions, feel free to post them in the comments below.
But, but, we used smeg...
Make sure you send us at least two samples per section for sequencing this year. We may or may not be able to do some extra smeg phages, so make sure we've got some extra ones of yours on hand in case we can!