"Resources" section

A new section called "Resources" has appeared on the website. In this section, I plan to post the collection of Thermus bacteriophages we have in our lab, the collection of extremophile strains we have managed to isolate, and some notes that may be useful when working with both.

The website now has a "Phages" section. It contains information about the phages kept in our lab (assuming, of course, they haven't died off, which does happen sometimes). We isolated most of these phages ourselves; a few (P23-45, for example) came to us from other labs (so many years have passed that their exact path can no longer be traced).

The Phages page lists these phages along with their name, host, morphotype, and life cycle. A caveat right away: for many of the phages we haven't done electron microscopy of the virions, so their morphotype is predicted from their genome sequences. The same goes for the life cycle: for a number of phages we can say with considerable confidence that they are likely capable of integrating into the host genome (and in some cases, similar proviruses are found in the genomes of isolated strains), but this doesn't mean we have observed lysogen formation under laboratory conditions.

Clicking a phage's name in the table opens its phage card. The card provides detailed information about that particular bacteriophage: a TEM image of the virions (if available), where the phage was isolated from, what it infects, and, most importantly, a link to download the annotated genome in GenBank format. I also plan to use the phage cards to write about what's interesting about each phage: what it's related to, what interesting genes it encodes, and generally why it might deserve our attention.