Jaroslav Budis
Comenius University Science Park, Bratislava, Slovakia
Title: Pheri - Sequence based classification of bacteriophages
Biography
Biography: Jaroslav Budis
Abstract
Bacteriophages are viral particles that infect and replicate inside bacterial organisms. Since they are specific to a particular strain of bacteria, advances in their research could lead to novel means of targeted treatment without adverse effects on natural microbiome in patient’s body. Moreover, this treatment could be effective against bacterial strains with antibiotic resistance. One of the main bottlenecks of bacteriophage research is inability to cultivate some of the phages due to missing information about their hosts.
We designed a bioinformatics pipeline, called Pheri (Phage Host ExploRatIon), to predict bacteriophage hosts from its genomic sequence. The decision is supported by a set of genes that should correspond to the specificity of the phage. We evaluated the pipeline on a set of 6277 phage sequences downloaded from several publicly available databases.
Our pipeline has a potential to assist in discovery and characterization of novel phages and underlying mechanisms behind their behavior.