We had a great meeting in Florida to hash out details for our Sarracenia purpurea microbiome project and our big sampling effort this summer.
The Team
Lovely visit and talk from Dr. Lauren Shoemaker
It was great to have Dr. Lauren Shoemaker visit our lab group and give a departmental seminar this past April.
Lauren and Leonora in the sagebrush
Congratulations to Jessica for Redfield Fellowship!
Jessica won the Redfield Graduate Fellowship from BSU’s Department of Biological Sciences, and will be awarded funds to use for her fieldwork this summer.
Congratulations to Jacob for the Graduate College Mentoring Award!
PhD student Jacob Heil won the Boise State Graduate College Mentoring Award, and we celebrated at the ceremony, where Jessica was also recognized for her 3 Minute Thesis win.
Jacob Heil, Leonora Bittleston and Jessica Bernardin
New paper out in eLife
Our paper just came out in eLife last week: https://elifesciences.org/articles/74987! Only the abstract is up right now, but the full paper should be published soon. This paper, titled “Interactions between strains govern the eco-evolutionary dynamics of microbial communities” examines bacteria from pitcher plant communities at the strain level and finds that strains with very little genomic separation (~100 SNPs) can have different growth dynamics. Furthermore, most of the interactions (correlations) among taxa occur at the strain, and not the ASV, level. The analysis and writing for this paper was led by Dr. Akshit Goyal, a Physics of Living Systems Fellow at MIT.
Jessica wins 2nd place in BSU 3 Minute Thesis competition!
PhD student Jessica Bernardin recently competed in Boise State’s 3 Minute Thesis competition, and won 2nd place! You can watch her talk here: https://youtu.be/9Qj_nHeAea0?t=3602 and learn more about the microbial communities in pitcher plants. She will be giving her talk again next week at the state finals. Go Jessica!
Stacey Pedraza awarded a HERC Fellowship
Undergraduate Stacey Pedraza was awarded a Higher Education Research Council (HERC) Fellowship for the Spring 2022 semester and will be working on a project examining how pitcher-plant associated microbial communities break down different types of insect prey. Congratulations!
New paper out today in mSystems
A new perspective paper was published today in mSystems! This paper came out of our lab’s NSF MTM collaboration with a great group of people, and is titled: “Exploring Microbiome Functional Dynamics through Space and Time with Trait-Based Theory.” It’s open access and you can find it here: https://doi.org/10.1128/mSystems.00530-21. It is part of a special series called “Deciphering the Microbiome.”
Summer Undergraduate students presenting their research posters!
So proud of the four summer undergrads who have done great research! They are presenting posters tomorrow at ICUR (https://boisestate.edu/icur/). Also proud of the grad students and postdoc who stepped up to be fantastic mentors. Great job everyone!
Welcome, Erica!
Erica Holdridge joined the lab this January, 2021, as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow. She will be studying how bacterial viruses in the Sarracenia purpurea pitcher plant system affect bacterial communities and ecosystem functioning. It’s wonderful to have her as part of the team!