K|RITH Genetics Course

30 students were selected to attend the K RITH Mycobacterium Genetics Course at the Westville Campus which ran from 18th to the 29th of July 2011. With the great opportunity granted to spend the whole day with Dr's and Prof' who are high up the Medical Research ladder such as Dr. Bisshai (the new Director of K RITH), as well as representatives from Pittsburg University, Havard Medical School, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, as well as Albert Einstein School of Medicine.

The main aim of this course was to introduce to students isolation, characterization and visualization of novel bacteriophages; gene discovery and gene annotations; construction of defined mutants of mycobacteria; as well as research methods, experimental design, and data interpretation. In addition to that there took place laboratory and bioinformatics studies with a series of lectures in microbial genetics and drug discovery in microbial genetics and drug discovery by expects in the field with all of these seminars being streamed on the internet by the school.

This fun-filled expedition was more than just about students finding samples and isolating phages, it was like a whole new world of discovery of how and what phages do in their environment, how they behave and how we can use them to manipulate certain systems with hopeful results of curing TB. With a diverse selection of students from 3rd year students, to postgradute students from different levels of qualification to lab technicians and medical practitioners, young and slender - this course was the epitomy of educational discovery. At the end of the course more than 40 novel phages had been discovered and named and placed into a database that collects all international information on discovered phages - putting South Africa and its discoverers on the map!

What was more exciting for the students participating in this course was not the food (although it did play a major role in the extention of the PhageHunters shelf life) it was the opportunity granted to submit work to GenBank which is a database of annotated genomes used by scientists all over the world in their research projects when working with genes (compare this to a house than stores all the information one would need to know about a genome of a bacteria).

My accomplishments at the end of the two weeks was:

1. Sequence annotation of a new specie of a virus

2. A GenBank author/publisher

3. Discovery of 7 novel mycobacteriophages

4. 4 of my phages have been named and deposited into an international database for m.phages and I named them Cruu, Ukukhanya, Bafana, and Ntando (the links will send you to their webpages on the database)

Really stoked about that!

B's desk