T7 group of phages share a similar genome organization and a unique transcription system, which contains a phage-encoded single-subunit RNA polymerase and a set of well-conserved T7-like promoters. Such a transcription system is a hallmark feature of the T7 group, and by this criterion, it's easy to tell whether a phage belongs to the T7 group, or it is just T7-like. Read more...

T7 islands are prophage-like islands that have mostly been found in enterobacterial genomes. All T7 islands have two or three tandem T7-like promoters that point to the same direction and would transcribe two to five putative phage-related proteins. Read more...

T7 excess information was originally noticed and characterized by Dr. Schneider in 1986. Recently we expanded our information theory analysis to all available genomes of the T7 group, and found that all members of this group have excess information at their promoters. We propose that the promoter excess information can be explained by the takeover ratio, which was defined as the ratio between information contents of the phage SD and the corresponding host SD. A paper about this is in preparation.

Fur is a global regulator of bacterial iron uptake systems. We build refined E. coli Fur binding site models using information theory, and use the models to predict Fur binding. Read more...