Our manuscript, titled “Assay for Evaluating the Abundance of Vibrio cholerae and Its O1 Serogroup Subpopulation from Water without DNA Extraction” has been published in Pathogens! Give it a read!
Good job team :-)
Lockdown! Card Game Interview with CNA938
In this interview, Dr Yann Boucher and Dr Anna Szücs shares their heart behind the creation of Lockdown! Hear them as they speak about the birth of this idea and the shifts in perspectives they hope players will have after playing the game.
At this juncture, we would also like to show our greatest appreciation to the Singapore government and those who have been working hard in other ways as we navigate through the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s still an ongoing fight, but we’re definitely adapting well.
If you haven’t gotten your hands on Lockdown!, it’s not too late! Click here to order now!
Stay safe everyone!
Lockdown! Game LAUNCH!!
Sick of being locked down? Spice things up with your family and friends with our NEW Lockdown! card game!
Created by our very own Dr Yann Boucher together with Dr Anna Szücs from NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, this is an engaging and exciting educational card game aimed at raising public awareness about the Covid-19 pandemic from a public health perspective. Have a go at wearing the hat of a government where you get to implement various public health measures to save the most Covid-19 patients in their countries!
What’s better is that this game can be played individually or in teams of two among family and friends. Suitable for any occassion and setting!
What are you waiting for? Get competitive, learn loads, and most importantly, HAVE FUN! Place your orders here NOW!!! All proceeds will go to The Red Pencil (Singapore).
Dalong joins the lab !
Dr. Hu just landed in Singapore, COVID-free ! We look forward to applying his bioinformatics skills to tracing transmission pathways of antimicrobial resistant pathogens in Singapore and to him using his epidemiology knowledge to tunravel the human microbiome. Welcome Dr. Hu !
Vanessa joins the lab
Vanessa has a B.Sc. in life sciences and experience in anaerobic culturing. She is joining the lab to kick start a culturomics project for gut microbiome bacteria. Welcome Vanessa !
One of Yann's bucket list dreams is achieved, we described a new species called Vibrio paracholerae !
Tareq’s efforts and perseverance payed off, he is the new daddy of Vibrio parcholerae sp. nov., which was just published online in Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
See the full article at: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/AEM.00422-21
Most efforts to understand the biology of Vibrio cholerae have focused on a single group, the pandemic-generating lineage harbouring the strains responsible for all known cholera pandemics. Consequently, little is known about the diversity of this species in its native aquatic environment. To understand thedifferences in the V. cholerae populations inhabiting regions with a history of cholera cases and thoselacking such a history, a comparative analysis of population composition was performed. Little overlap was found in lineage compositions between those in Dhaka (cholera endemic) located in the Ganges delta, and of Falmouth (no known history of cholera), a small coastal town on the United States east coast. The moststriking difference was the presence of a group of related lineages at high abundance in Dhaka which wascompletely absent from Falmouth. Phylogenomic analysis revealed that these lineages form a cluster at the base of the phylogeny for the V. cholerae species, sufficiently differentiated genetically and phenotypicallyto form a novel species. A retrospective search revealed that strains from this species have been anecdotallyfound from around the world and were isolated as early as 1916 from a British soldier in Egypt suffering from choleraic diarrhoea. In 1935 Gardner and Venkatraman unofficially referred to a member of this group as Vibrio paracholerae. In recognition of this earlier designation, we propose the name Vibrio paracholerae sp. nov. for this bacterium. Genomic analysis suggests a link with human populations forthis novel species and substantial interaction with its better- known sister species.
Nora's T6SS paper gets published !
After much effort and countless competition assays, Nora’s study on the competitive fitness of Vibrio cholerae strains with different assortments of T6SS effectors and immunity proteins has finally been accepted in Frontiers in Microbiology.
Read the paper at:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2021.671092/full
Haripriya joins the lab
Haripriya, who has a masters in veterinary science, is the first lab member in Singapore. She is a Research Assistant who will work on antimicrobial resistance in enteric pathogens. Welcome Haripriya !
Vibrio metoecus and Vibrio cholerae qPCR method gets published
Tania’s qPCR paper got published in MDPI Pathogens. Look at the paper here: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0817/9/12/1053
The Lab is Moving to Singapore !
After his sabbatical, Yann has been offered a joint position at the Singapore Center for Environmental Life Sciences (Nanyang Technological University) and the Saw Swee hock School of Public Health (National University of Singapore). He is now recruiting new graduate students and postdocs in this tropical paradise :) The lab will open its doors in the new year at SCELSE.
