Jia Yee joins the lab

Jia Yee just completed her one-week SHN (stay-home-notice) upon arrival in Singapore and no COVID detected! Jia Yee will involve in the St. John’s Island Resistome (SIR) project, looking at antibiotic resistance transmission across One Health domains in Singapore. Welcome Jia Yee!

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 !

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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.

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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

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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 !

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