O'TooleLab

OToole Lab News

April 30, 2013

I don't often link to papers from other groups on our lab blog, but this was just too cool.  We sent strains to Cynthia Collin's group at RPI who just published a paper entitled "Spaceflight Promotes Biofilm Formation by Pseudomonas aeruginosa", see here.  They grew biofilms on two different shuttle missions.  They show that the biofilms formed in space are more robust than those on Earth, that "...the biofilms formed during spaceflight exhibited a column-and-canopy structure that has not been observed on Earth", and that flagellar motility is absolutely required for biofilm formation in space.  I'll probably never get into space myself, but having our strains sent these is the next best thing!

April 21, 2013

Chelsea Boyd, a PhD student in the lab successfully defended her thesis on Friday.  Tom Silhavy served as her outside examiner, and it was terrific to have him spend a few days with us. Congrats to Dr. Boyd!



April 19, 2013


On Wednesday April 17th Gary Heussler, a PhD student in my group, and Samantha Roberts (a PhD student in Amy Gladfelter's lab)  met with 9 high school students from a physics class from the Vershire Mountain School in Vermont to give a lecture on the physics of microscopy here on the Dartmouth campus. They also demonstrated use of the microscopes using the full potential of the advanced Dartmouth scopes. They had the students examine their own cheek cells using DIC, prepared fluorescence microscopy slides of mammalian cells using various fluorescent channels, and wet mount slides of P. fluorescence with phase contrast. The students really got a kick out of it!

April 12, 2013

Katie Price, a post-doc in the lab, was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation to support her studies of polymicrobial communities in CF.



April 08, 2013

I recently returned from a trip to the University of Minnesota.  I happened to visit the day after the 124th birthday of Arthur Henrici, one of the earliest biofilm researchers.  He published several papers in the 20's and 30's - these were some of the first papers describing biofilms, although that word had not been coined yet.  I have a quote from one of Henrici's papers on my the front page of my lab web site!  Henrici spent his career at the University of Minnesota, and some of his old slides (see below, two images on left) are under the care of Marty Dworkin, a faculty member in the microbiology department at Minnesota.  The image on the left is of a slide prepared by Henrici himself!  And on the day I visited, Dr. Dworkin threw a bit of a birthday celebration for Henrici (bottom right), including highlighting some of the facts covered in his recent history of Henrici penned for Microbe.  It was a great bit of microbiology and biofilm history!