Paul will present his current work at the third installment of the Bacterial Pathogens Club (BacPac) meeting for the 2013/2014 season.
BacPac is held every first Thursday of the month from (except January) during the fall and winter terms. It is organized by Dr. Stefan Pukatzki (Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology).
Tania attended the Computational Microbial Ecology Workshop in Romulus, Michigan on August 26-28, 2013. The workshop aimed to familiarize participants with mothur, an open-source software for the bioinformatics needs of the microbial ecology community. The workshop was a mix of lectures, discussions, and hands-on use of mothur with real sequence data. The workshop was organized by Dr. Pat Schloss and his team from the University of Michigan, who are also the developers of the mothur software.
Tania receives the Queen Elizabeth II scholarship from the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research. The Government of Alberta funds the scholarship and is available to Canadian citizens and permanent residents. Congratulations Tania!
Paul recently attended the First International Summer School on Evolution at the Ciência Viva Knowledge Pavilion, Lisbon, Portugal on July 15-19, 2013. During the week-long event, international experts in the field held courses on the critical aspects of biological and socio-cultural evolution, which centered around the following themes: evolutionary theory, sociocultural evolution, and philosophy of biology.
This workshop was organized by the the Applied Evolutionary Epistemology Lab of the Centre for Philosophy of Science of the University of Lisbon, in collaboration with Ciência Viva and with the support of the John Templeton Foundation.
Paul (far left) and all participants
Yan and Fabini were part of a huge collaborative group, lead by Dr. Lee Katz and Dr. Cheryl Tarr of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), that published an article today in mBio entitled "Evolutionary dynamics of Vibrio cholerae O1 following a single-source introduction to Haiti." The article shows that the source of cholera, caused by V. cholerae, that hit Haiti in 2010 following the devastating earthquake came from a single source and was not introduced repeatedly to Haiti.
Other members of the group were researchers and public health officials from the National Microbiology Laboratory – Public Health Agency of Canada, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Georgia Institute of Technology, Pacific Biosciences, Haiti National Public Health Laboratory, and Harvard University.
The manuscript was received, accepted (unconditionally), and published all within SIX WEEKS. The release was also picked up by science news blogs EurekAlert! and mBiosphere.
The radiation of numerous lineages of V. cholerae O1 strains from a single sequence type that predominated in the early part of the Haiti cholera epidemic (from Katz et al., 2013)
The University of Alberta "OMICs" Conference was held this year at the Katz Building on June 17, 2013. Multiple talks and posters were presented from the ever growing "omics" fields – genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, glycomics, lipidomics, etc.
Tania presented a poster entitled "Environmental multilocus sequence typing of natural Vibrio cholerae populations."
The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) annual meeting of members of the Integrated Microbial Biodiversity (IMB) Program was held in Whistler, British Columbia on May 14-17, 2013. As IMB Fellow, Yan could bring one student to the conference. Tania attended the conference with Yan this year, and she presented a poster entitled "Environmental multilocus sequence typing of natural Vibrio cholerae populations."
Yan and Tania recently published a book chapter in the Encyclopedia of Metagenomics entitled "Lateral gene transfer and microbial diversity," with co-author Dr. Rebecca Case, also from the Department of Biological Sciences. The chapter discusses the processes involved in lateral gene transfer, the acquisition of genetic material from individuals that are not an organism's direct cellular parent, and their consequences on the diversity of microbial populations.
Generating genetic diversity in bacteria and archaea (from Nasreen et al., 2013)
The 2013 Dr. Richard E. Peter Biology Conference was held at the Centennial Centre for Interdisciplinary Sciences, University of Alberta on March 7-8. 2013. This annual student-run conference is organized by the Biological Sciences Graduate Student Association of the Department of Biological Sciences to showcase life sciences research conducted by students at the University of Alberta and institutions across the province.
Research projects from the Microbiology 492 class (Environmental Microbiology Laboratory) of Dr. Rebecca Case were presented at the conference. Paul co-authored the poster "Influence of vertically inherited symbionts and environmental bacteria on microbial communities in glass sponges." Both Tania and Fabini co-authored the poster "Microbial community analysis of wastewater tertiary effluent using 16S rRNA PCR-DGGE." These were presented by fellow graduate students, Anna Bramucci and Albert Rosana, respectively.
This year's internal keynote speaker was Dr. Heather Proctor (Department of Biological Sciences). Dr. Lenore Fahrig from Carleton University was the external keynote speaker.