Honors Program

University Honors

Date of Award

5-2021

Thesis Professor(s)

Ranjan Chakraborty

Thesis Professor Department

Health Sciences

Thesis Reader(s)

Ranjan Chakraborty, Sean Fox

Abstract

Iron is extremely important for many organisms. Despite its abundancy, it exists in insoluble forms that makes its usability difficult. Some organisms secrete siderophores, low molecular weight compounds, that can chelate iron and convert it into usable forms for cells. One such organism, Rhizobium leguminosarum, is a nitrogen fixing symbiont proteobacteria that infects leguminous plants. The genome of Rhizobium leguminosarum ATCC 14479, which infects the red clover, Trifoli pratense, has previously been completely sequenced in our lab. Our lab has identified several genes in this strain involved in the biosynthesis of a siderophore, vicibactin. The protein product of one of those genes, VbsS, is hypothesized to be a non-ribosomal peptide synthase. It has been attempted to knockout the VbsS gene utilizing the ‘splicing by overlap extension’ method. Additionally, an in-silico analysis of the genome revealed the Vbs genes in R. leguminosarum ATCC 14479 strain were similar to genes in found in the proteobacterium Phyllobacterium sp. 628 and the fungi Aspergillus fumigatus Af293.

Publisher

East Tennessee State University

Document Type

Honors Thesis - Open Access

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Copyright

Copyright by the authors.

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