Spring news, updates, and congratulations

It has been a fantastic Spring in the lab, and we are launching into a busy summer of research, with three ongoing field trials (that’s right, we’re heading outdoors!) and a new cohort of summer undergraduate researchers. Stay tuned for more on their work soon.

First, a few congratulations:

1) Dr. Norma Morella has successfully completed her PhD! She is heading off to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle to work in the lab of Neelendu Dey, studying the role of the human microbiome in gastrointestinal cancer. During her four years in the lab, Norma developed numerous tools (including the use of ddPCR for exploring bacteria-phage interactions) ran a series of pathbreaking experiments to explore how phages impact the microbiome and most recently how microbial communities in the phyllosphere adapt to hosts over successive passaging. She was also a fantastic mentor to undergraduate researchers in the lab, a wonderful collaborator, and a general joy to be around. We will miss her! But are all very excited to follow her career and future research.

2) First year PhD student Reena Debray was awarded the SSE Graduate Research Excellence Grant (R.C. Lewontin Early Award) to support her work using functional genomics to probe adaptation of commensal bacteria to their plant hosts.

3) Fourth year PhD student Cathy Hernandez received an outstanding abstract award For the upcoming ASM Microbe meeting. Make sure to catch her talk from 1:45pm – 1:55pm on Sat, Jun 22 if you are attending.

4) and our newest lab member (soon to be first year PhD student in the lab) Mason Kamalani Chock received a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship. He’ll be bringing his fungal community expertise to the lab, so stay tuned for a more complete picture of the microbiome!

and 5) Britt received a Hellman award from the Hellman Family Faculty Fund to support the lab’s work on microbiome-mediated protection against pathogens.

Next, a few new publications to share (most up on BioRxiv now, so please share your thoughts/comments with us!)

1) Morella, N. M., Zhang, X., & Koskella, B. (2019). Tomato seed-associated bacteria confer protection of seedlings against foliar speck caused by Pseudomonas syringae. Phytobiomes Journal, (ja). Online early here!

2) Morella, N. M., Weng, F. C. H., Joubert, P. M., Metcalf, C. J. E., Lindow, S., & Koskella, B. (2019). Successive passaging of a plant-associated microbiome reveals robust habitat and host genotype-dependent selection. bioRxiv, 627794. Found here.

3) C. Jessica Metcalf and Britt Koskella. (2019) Protective microbiomes can limit the evolution of host pathogen defense. bioRxiv 665265; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/665265

(Now here: Metcalf, C.J.E. and Koskella, B. (2019), Protective microbiomes can limit the evolution of host pathogen defense. Evolution Letters, 3: 534-543.)

and 4) C. Jessica E. Metcalf, Lucas P Henry, Maria Rebolleda-Gomez, and Britt Koskella. (2019) Why evolve reliance on the microbiome for timing of ontogeny? bioRxiv 665182; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/665182

(Now here: Metcalf, C. J. E., Henry, L. P., Rebolleda-Gómez, M., & Koskella, B. (2019). Why Evolve Reliance on the Microbiome for Timing of Ontogeny?. mBio, 10(5).)

And for those attending either ASM Microbe 2019 (San Francisco), ASPB 2019 (San Jose), the Microbial Population Biology GRC, or ESEB 2019 (Turku, Finland) – we hope to see you there!