| Abstract | Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria and the first step of infection is binding to the surface of bacterial cells. They have been used to detect bacteria due to their strong binding affinity to the cell wall surface of bacteria. A phage enzyme, lysine, has a binding domain and the tip of the phage tail fiber has a peptide that binds to the bacteria which are used in this project. The goal of this project is to test the efficacy of the peptides binding to different bacterial strains from the Enterobacteriaceae family. This will enable the detection of bacteria from contaminated water samples. We hypothesize that our peptides will bind to the surface of any strain of bacteria from the Enterobacteriaceae family. To accomplish this goal we started by tagging our phage peptides with a GFP tag to enable the visualization of the binding. Then to test the efficacy of binding, we plan to use confocal microscopy, immunomagnetic beads and 16S PCR. Preliminary results on the binding of our tagged peptides show that the peptides were able to bind to E. coli C and E. coli C600 cells and we were able to visualize this binding using light microscopy with GFP transmission. In conclusion, phage proteins can be used as bacterial detection tools.
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