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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Aug 27, 2025

Phage Phenomics: Physiological Approaches to Characterize Novel Viral Proteins

Phage Phenomics: Physiological Approaches to Characterize Novel Viral Proteins

Published on: June 11, 2015

Experimental validation that human microbiome phages use alternative genetic coding.

Samantha L Peters^1,2, Adair L Borges^3,4, Richard J Giannone¹

¹Biosciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA.

Nature Communications

|September 29, 2022

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Bacteriophages in the human gut can use a modified genetic code, reassigning the TAG stop codon to glutamine. This study provides experimental evidence for this

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Area of Science:

Microbiology
Genetics
Bioinformatics

Background:

Metagenomic analyses suggest bacteriophages may employ non-standard genetic codes.
A predicted variation involves the reassignment of the TAG stop codon to glutamine (genetic code 15).

Purpose of the Study:

To experimentally validate the use of genetic code 15 in human microbiome phages.
To investigate the expression of reassigned codons in phage proteins.

Main Methods:

LC-MS/MS-based metaproteomics of human fecal samples.
Analysis of phage structural proteins.

Main Results:

Experimental evidence for genetic code 15 in two crAss-like phages.
Proteomic data supports TAG codon reassignment to glutamine in phage proteins.
This reassignment occurs late in the phage infection cycle.

Conclusions:

The study experimentally validates the expression of genetic code 15 in human microbiome bacteriophages.
This finding expands our understanding of genetic diversity within the human microbiome.