Emily Nall (far left in the photo), who has been an undergraduate researcher in the lab for her entire time at LSU, defended her Honors Thesis yesterday entitled Physiological and Genomic Characterization of a Novel Isolate from the OM252 Clade of Gammaproteobacteria. Emily has been working steadily on this project for a couple years. She has used comparative genomics to reconstruct the metabolism of strain LSUCC0096, tested a number of physiological parameters, some of which were predicted from the genome, and has examined the organism’s distribution throughout our coastal data as well as the Tara Oceans data. The next step will be getting the final pieces of this project together for publication. It’s important to note that Emily also funded part of this project herself through a Louisiana Sea Grant Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) Fellowship. We’re very proud of you Emily and wish you all the best after graduation!