March 31, 2016

 Gary Heussler, a PhD student in the lab, successfully defended his thesis yesterday.  He has been studying the role of CRISPR-Cas systems in biofilm formation and phage defense by Pseudmonas aeruginosa.  Check out two of Gary's papers here and here.  His outside examiner was David Weiss from Emory University, who has done some vbery nice work on CRISPRs in Francisella.

March 24, 2016

On Tuesday, March 22 we held the 6th annual Dartmouth Cystic Fibrosis Retreat.  The goal of the the retreat is to bring together basic- and physician-scientists with clinicians and with members of pharma and biotech to talk about all aspects of science and care related to CF.  This is a regional meeting drawing investigators from across New England.  This year we had >100 registrants, and the event was held at the Hanover Inn on the Dartmouth campus in Hanover, NH.  The Dartmouth CF retreat was generously sponsored by Vertex Pharmaceuticals.

March 23, 2016

Nicki Limoli joined just started in the lab as a postdoc.  She did her graduate training with Dan Wozniak at Ohio State University, and spent a year training with Joanna Goldberg at Emory University.  She will be studying polymicrobial communities relevant to Cystic Fibrosis and her work is supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.  Welcome!

March 18, 2016

Deb Hogan and I visited a local daycare today to share the wonder of bacteria and fungi to preschoolers!  We told them about Baker's yeast and luminescent bacteria.  It was a fun event.

March 12, 2016

A recent focus of the lab has been the study of "surface sensing" by Pseudomonas aeruginosa.  That is, does P. aeruginosa know it has contacted a surface when it is initiating biofilm formation?  I think the answer is yes! In a recent review article co-authored by myself and Gerard Wong, a close collaborator of the lab who is at UCLA, we discuss some older literature in this area, some of the most recent work from our labs in P. aeruginosa and other microbes, and where we think the field is going.  A figure from the review is shown here.

March 02, 2016

Gary Heussler, a PhD student in the lab, recently published a minireview in the Journal of Bacteriology that discusses the role of "self-targeting" by CRISPR-Cas systems.  That is, we typically think of these CRISPR-Cas systems as defenses against invasion by phages.  However, a number of recent papers report the presence of spacers in CRISPR loci with perfect or near-perfect identity to sequences on the same organism's chromosome.  This observation indicates the possibility that a CRISPR-Cas system has the potential to target "self".  Gary's review covers recent work showing a role for self-targeting impacting bacterial group behaviors (see a recent paper by Gary from our lab), shaping bacterial genomes and populations, and serving as a tool to engineer bacteria.  A figure from the review is shown here illustrating these roles of self-targeting.

March 01, 2016

Two former lab members met up in San Diego last night.  Kyle Cady (on the left) is a scientist at Synthetic Genomics and Dae-Gon Ha (right) works for an investment bank and was visiting San Diego.  Joining them is Christen DiPetrillo, another alum of our MCB graduate program.