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Materials and methods In this study we compared the codon frequencies between the phages that carry tRNA in their genome (Clusters A2, A3, A5, A6, A9, C1, C2, E, J, K1, L1, L2, M) to those phages without tRNA in their genome (Clusters A1, A4, B1, B2, D, F1, G) in order to determine whether the tRNAs being carried by the mycobacteriophages were needed to survive in M. smegmatis. The phages with embedded tRNAs were drawn from http:// phagesdb.org/data/. The coding sequences for the mycobacteriophages were obtained from NCBI GenBank [2]. Codon frequencies were derived for each mycobacteriophage and a BoxWhiskerChart (Figure 1) was made using a program written in Mathematica. To determine which codons may require expression of phage tRNAs, Figure 1 plot regions for phages containing tRNA (red) that show frequencies in excess of those not containing tRNA (blue) have been circled in magenta. Only a few codons meet this criteria: ACT, ATG, CAG***, CGT, GAC**, GAG*, TAC, TAT, TGG. A significant number of mycobacteriophages lay outside the non-tRNA phage boundaries for codons CAG, GAC

The University of Tennessee (UT), the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and the Kentucky Biomedical Research Infrastructure Network (KBRIN), have collaborated over the past eleven years to share research and educational expertise in bioinformatics. One result of this collaboration is the joint sponsorship of an annual regional summit to bring together researchers, educators and students who are interested in bioinformatics from a variety of research and educational institutions. This summit provides unique opportunities for collaboration and forging links between members of the various institutions. This year, the Eleventh Annual UT-ORNL-KBRIN Bioinformatics Summit was held at the Seelbach Hilton Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky from March 30-April 1, 2012. A total of 232 participants pre-registered for the summit, with 126 from various Kentucky institutions and 80 from various Tennessee institutions. A number of additional participants came from universities and research institutions from other states and countries, e.g. University of Arkansas Medical Sciences, Michigan State University, University of Cincinnati, Iowa State University, etc. Eighty-four registrants were faculty, with an additional 68 students, 37 staff, and 32 postdoctoral participants (with 12 undeclared). The conference program consisted of three days of presentations. The first day included a pre-summit of talks by Kentucky researchers and a workshop on Next-Generation Sequencing technologies. The next two days were dedicated to scientific presentations divided into four plenary sessions on Next-Generation Sequencing, Medical Informatics, Metagenomics, and Behavioral and Comparative Genomics. The Medical Informatics session was followed by four short talks, selected from 47 submitted poster abstracts.

* Correspondence: claire.rinehart@wku.edu Department of Biology, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY, 42101, USA Figure 1 Seven predicted pham 6714 structures superimposed into a single model matching methyltransferase structures. PDB files were rendered using UCSF Chimera (http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/). Proteins include MeeZee gp 78, JN243856.1; Backyardigan gp 74, JF704093.1; and ShiLan gp 70, JN020143.1 Kapadia and Rinehart BMC Bioinformatics 2013, 14(Suppl 17):A10 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/14/S17/A10