Discovery of bacteriophages in Acinetobacter baumannii: comparative analysis of targeted and non-targeted approaches

• Main Author: Palanivel Saravana Balaji
• Other Authors: Duan Hongwei
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Medicine, Health and Life Sciences; Bacteriophages; Proximity ligation; Antimicrobial resistance
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/177197
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The rapid emergence of antibiotic resistance bacteria like Acinetobacter baumannii (A. baumannii) is becoming a global threat to public health calling for alternative therapeutic strategies. Consequently, there has been a rekindled interest in reviving phage therapy to prevent the misuse of antibiotics. Steering away from the traditional phage isolation methods, phages targeting A. baumannii were attempted to be discovered with targeted and non-targeted approaches from environmental metagenomics samples. While targeted approach focuses on using conserve gene latching for phage characterisation with Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), the non-targeted Chromosome Conformation capture (Hi-C) approach employs proximity ligation to capture phage-host interactions in environmental samples. Despite the absence of A. baumannii phage from the Hi-C assembly reads, this methodology provides essential insights on the challenges faced in non-targeted phage discovery strategies highlighting the importance of optimising phage bioinformatics pipelines. In contrast, the targeted approach revealed the presence of a novel phage sequence discovered through the application of Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) providing a significant understanding the evolutionary dynamics existing between the phage and host.