August 27, 2015

The first year Molecular and Cellular Biology graduate students have arrived and are attending the program retreat today.

Jarrod Smith (shown here) is a PhD student in the lab, manning our lab poster as well as a poster describing the M2P2 program, which serves to connect the microbiology research on campus via journal club, our joint lab meeting and annual retreat.

August 20, 2015

Kurt Dahlstrom, a PhD student in the lab, just returned from a 6 week stint as a teaching assistant at the Marine Biological Laboratory.  Kurt served as the "genetics TA" for the Microbial Diversity course.  Check out a link here.  This intensive course starts with ~3 weeks of pre-planned experiments, followed by a 3 week miniproject.  Students are exposed to a broad variety of topics including physiology, metabolism, microbial ecology, cell biology, genomics and genetics.  This was Kurt's second year as a TA, and he found it to be a fantastic experience.

I returned from the inaugural offering of a 2-1/2 week "short course" at the MBL called Frontiers in Host Microbe Interactions - check out the link here.  The goal of this course, which includes lecture and an intensive lab component, is to introduce students to models of polymicrobial interaction with a host.  To move beyond descriptive microbiome students and to delve into the mechanism by which such complex communities interact with their host.  In the lab, we use a tissue culture model to study polymicrobial interactions in biofilm infections of cystic fibrosis, a zebra fish model of microbial communities impact on fat absorption, a mouse model of inflammatory gut disease and microbial colonization and an anemone-dinoflagellate symbiosis. The class website has a full list of the speakers.  We thank the Helmsley Foundation and the CF Foundation for financial support of the course, and a we received generous reagents and loaner equipment from Zeiss, Promega, Millipore, FloJo, and Miltenyi Biotec.