November 21, 2017

Mike Zegans, MD, a longtime collaborator with my group, was named the inaugural Francis A. L'Esperance Visual Scholar.  Dr. L'Esperance, a Dartmouth College and Dartmouth Medical School graduate, contributed to the development of laser corrective eye surgery.  Congratulations!

November 08, 2017

I am a big fan of publishing via scientific society journals.  Check out new on the formation of the Scientific Society Publisher Alliance here - this alliance seeks to promote publishing of science by scientists via society journals.

November 07, 2017

We just posted a new paper on bioRxiv looking at signaling specificity in a c-di-GMP network.  The work was lead by David Gaicalone, a research tech in the lab (left), with help from Jarrod Smith and Alan Collins, two PhD students in the lab, and Lori Koziol at New England College and Holger Sondermann at Cornell University.  We showed previously that the c-di-GMP receptor called LapD interacts with the c-di-GMP-synthesizing enzyme GcbC, and that this LapD-GcbC is critical for normal biofilm formation.  David's work makes an important contribution to this model by showing that GcbC activity is greatly enhanced when this enzyme is in complex with the LapD receptor, and that a ligand binding CACHE domain in the periplasmic loop of GcbC can further enhance its c-di-GMP-synthesizing activity and LapD interaction.  This manuscript also shows that many different c-di-GMP-synthesizing enzymes can interact with LapD.  Together, we propose that in response to environmental cues, different c-di-GMP-synthesizing diguanylate cyclase enzymes can interact with the LapD receptor, providing a mechanism for environmental responsive biofilm formation in the context of this netwrok.

November 02, 2017

Check out the poster for this year's Microbial Diversity Class!

November 01, 2017

A growing area of research in the lab is the study of polymicrobial communities.  These projects have grown out of microbiome studies focused on the airway of patients with cystic fibrosis.  I recently highlighted some of the contributions of the research from this field in a minireviw in the Journal of Bacteriology.  Check out the article here. The figure from the article showing how microbiome research fits into the larger understanding of airway infection in CF is shown on the left.