♪ The weather outside is frightful, but our microbes are so delightful… ♫
Our Christmas tree (reflecting Nora’s actual data and pictures of the lab) is up, and Santa has arrived just in time. Here is to hoping everyone has a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! See you in 2020!
Fabini, Tareq, Santa, Nora, and Kevin wishing you Merry Christmas and Happy 2020!
The entire lab attended the 2019 International Vibrio conference hosted at McGill University, in Quebec. Despite it being in the middle of winter, the weather was much nicer than back in Edmonton.
Yann was involved in the local organization committee for the meeting. Kevin and Tareq showcased posters on “Establishing a core genome multilocus sequence typing scheme for Vibrio cholerae in the epidemiology of cholera outbreaks” and “Intra-species diversity in geographically distinct V. cholerae populations,” respectively. Nora presented a talk on “Horizontally transferred type VI secretion systems effector-immunity gene arrays determine life and death in a diverse Vibrio cholerae population”. Both Nora and Kevin’s submissions were presented during the sessions sponsored by the Canadian Society of Microbiology. The entire lab enjoyed meeting new people, seeing familiar faces in the group, and exchanging ideas in the Vibrio field.
Attendees from the 2019 Vibrio conference. Photo credit: Cyrielle Noël.
Tareq was among 19 applicants in the Department of Biological Sciences selected to receive the University of Alberta Graduate Fellowship (UAGF), a new award that will be allocated this month. Congrats, Tareq!
Nora is one of the first students to receive a new award offered by the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta. The Dissertation Award for the 2019 Fall term commences today. Congrats, Nora!
Yann and Rebecca held a farewell party before they headed off on sabbaticals at the National University of Singapore and the Nanyang Technological University, respectively. Both labs got together for a group photo, including Fabini, who is currently doing a postdoc with a different group at the University of Alberta and completed his PhD under Yann, and Tania, who defended her PhD thesis last week.
Good luck in Singapore, we are excited to be updated on your sabbatical journey!
The last Boucher and Case lab group photo for a while. Missing: Catherine Bannon, one of Rebecca’s students, defended her Master’s degree the same day and was unable to attend the farewell party.
Tania started her PhD journey in September 2012, and successfully defended her thesis work, “Quantitative evaluation of environmental Vibrio cholerae population dynamics over temporal and spatial scales” today. She will now be working as a Research Associate in Dr. Nicholas Ashbolt’s lab (Department of Public Health) here at the University of Alberta. Congrats, Tania!
Nora has just returned from a three week summer course on microbial biofilms held at the Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE) research unit within Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The summer course explored biofilms on a multidisciplinary scale, and involved lecturers and competitively selected participants from over 22 different countries. Lab tours and demos in SCELSE and the National University of Singapore (NUS) showcased cutting edge technology employed to understand microbial systems on a variety of levels.
The SCELSE summer course of 2019 group photo. Photo credit: Vicki Yang for SCELSE.
In addition to the nine Vibrio sp. genomes deposited late last November, a new genome announcement with eight additional Vibrio isolates has come out today. Working alongside the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention again, these newly described Vibrio strains have come from a variety of blood, stool or wound infections, in addition to a previously described environmental strain. All genomes within the article "Draft genome sequences of eight Vibrio sp. clinical isolates from across the United States that form a basal sister clade to Vibrio cholerae" cluster within a single clade, and molecular analyses for species delineation place these isolates at or below the species cutoff values when compared to representative V. cholerae strains. This suggests these strains may form a basal V. cholerae lineage, or a new species related to V. cholerae.
