September 11, 2014

Jarrod Smith, a PhD student in the lab had a good week.  He passed his qualifying exam and was appointed to the Microbiology and Molecular Pathogenesis (M2P2) training grant.  Congrats!

September 02, 2014

We published a recent collaborative paper headed up by Holger Sondermann's group at Cornell.  We have worked together for a couple a years now and it has been an absolutely fantastic collaboration.  Our recent work, published in eLife, describes a co-crystal structure of LapG, a periplasmic protease, and the periplasmic domain of LapD, a c-di-GMP receptor.  LapG targets LapA, a large cell-surface adhesin required to initiate biofilm formation.  Chelsea Boyd, a former PhD student in the lab, contributed mutagenesis and in vivo studies to this work.  This study, highlighted in the Cornell Chronical shows the mechanism whereby LapD likely regulates the LapG protease, and furthermore, we provide evidence that we can disrupt this interaction, which would render the cells as non-biofilm formers.

Eric Bordeleau has joined the lab as a postdoctoral fellow.  He comes to us from Sherbrooke University in Canada with funding from the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.  Welcome!