January 30, 2018

Melissa Kardish is visiting the lab from UC-Davis.  I met Melissa during the Microbial Diversity course at the MBL this summer - she was a student and I was one of the course faculty.  Melissa's independent mini-project looked at biofilms made by mixing a variety of Vibrio spp. isolated from around the MBL.  She saw some really surprising synergies when mixing these bugs in terms of their ability to make biofilms.  With funding from the MBL, she is spending a month in the lab following up on those studies, doing some imaging, and assessing how phages are impacting the ability of these communities to make biofilms.  Welcome to the lab!

January 12, 2018

Our paper studying the c-di-GMP network of Pseudomonas fluorescens was just published in JB.  Check it out here.  We used a combination of ~2000 bacterial 2-hybrid assays, transcriptional profiling of the network components across almost 50 growth conditions and the phenotypic analysis of over 50 network mutants across almost 200 growth conditions to assess the network.  Our central finding is that a combination of two of these three mechanisms (protein-protein interaction, transcriptional regulation or nutrient response) controls a typical output.

January 10, 2018

Mike Henson, PhD, A Professor from the Department of Chemical Engineering at UMass-Amherst is visiting the lab for the winter semester while he is on sabbatical.  Mike does metabolic modeling of microbial systems, and he'll be working with us on some of our polymicrobial interaction studies.  Check out his webpage here.