Congratulations go to Mike for being awarded a Lerner-Gray Grant for Marine Research from the American Museum of Natural History. Mike will use the grant to explore the use of Oxford Nanopore sequencing to conduct coastal gene expression surveys for various abundant SAR11 bacteria, including LD12. An excellent accomplishment!
Author: jcthrash
Celeste and Emily’s posters from #ASMicrobe 2017
Thrash lab presentations at #ASMicrobe
Mike, Celeste, and Emily will all be presenting at the 2017 ASM Microbe conference in New Orleans this coming weekend. Here is the info to find them:
Saturday (6/3)
Poster Session: AES11 – Freshwater and Marine Microbiology I
Time: 12:15 PM – 2:15 PM
Cultivation and Ecology of Novel SAR11 Taxa from Coastal Louisiana Waters (#700), V. Celeste Lanclos
Metabolic and Physiological Flexibility in a Coastal Isolate from the OM252 Clade of Gammaproteobacteria (#712), Emily Nall
Sunday (6/4)
Symposium: 425 – Culturing the Unculturable in a Sequencing Age (Room 352)
Time: 2:30 PM – 5:00 PM
Fresh and Salty: Cultivating Bacteria from the Coast of Louisiana, Michael W. Henson
Storify on finishing bacterial genomes
Usually when you sequence bacterial genomes, the process of completely closing them (so-termed because most bacterial genomes are circular) whereby a single scaffold overlaps itself at the ends, requires a lot of effort. We’ve had very good luck with our Illumina sequencing and SPAdes assembly process, negating the need for things like primer walking, and we’re very close to finishing two very important genomes. Since this is unfamiliar territory for me (almost all genomes I’ve worked with thus far have been “draft” quality, usually with multiple scaffolds), I queried the Twitter micro community on the best methods for verifying a closed genome. This is from yesterday….
The Microbes of the Mississippi River – A Rowing Adventure for Science
For the past four months a crew of four rowers and four shore crew members with OAR Northwest, a not-for-profit adventure education organization, have been on a journey of a lifetime on the Mississippi River. After over 100 days of rowing, the crew has traveled from the headwaters of the River in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. They arrived in Baton Rouge on November 16, 2016 and spent a few days visiting LSU and talking to students about their journey.
Just as the state of Louisiana has a special connection with the “Mighty” Mississippi River, the OAR Northwest rowing crew has a special connection with LSU. This is the second OAR Northwest Mississippi River adventure during which rowers have collected water samples for Dr. Cameron Thrash, an assistant professor in the LSU Biological Sciences department. Cameron’s research focuses on relationships between microorganisms and biogeochemical cycles, particularly in marine systems. Thanks to a relationship with the OAR Northwest team that started when founder Jordan Hanssen met Cameron’s family in Washington, and which has developed into an ongoing citizen science project, the Thrash lab is now building a complete microbial “map” of the Mississippi river…
See more from Paige Jarreau and me about this amazing project at The Pursuit LSU College of Science Blog HERE.
Emily and Celeste present at LSU Discover Day
Emily presented her LA Sea Grant-funded work to characterize one of our coastal isolates from the OM252 clade, LSUCC0096. She showed this organism has remarkable salinity tolerance, and can grow under chemolithoautotrophic conditions, a feature that was predicted from genome analysis.
Celeste presented results of her experiment to enrich for microorganisms that could utilize fulvic acids as their sole carbon source. She compared her work to that of former lab member Jessica Weckhorst who performed a similar experiment with humic acids. These are both extremely important fractions of the marine DOC pool.
Thrash Lab research featured in The Pursuit
We have a little bit of press coverage here at LSU. See the post on our work at the College of Science website HERE.
