Congratulations to Alex Romero, who had his abstract accepted for poster presentation at the World Microbe Forum meeting this summer, and won two department travel awards to present at this meeting and the ASM Conference for Undergraduate Educators (ASMCUE) (with Andrew McDevitt from Laurel Hartley’s group). We’re excited for Alex to present his work on the Golden Retriever gut microbiome and the use of a Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience utilized to help complete this project.

Congratulations, Kayla, for being awarded a EUReCA! Summer Fellows Award. This is real $$$ to do real undergraduate research on campus this summer. Kayla will be helping with additional lab work and analysis of the microbial communities responsible for 1,4 dioxane bioremediation at the Lowry Landfill.

We are happy to have Lucia joining the lab from the Computational Bioscience program, after finishing up her rotation. Lucia is working on development of bioinformatics algorithms and approaches to improve protein annotation from shotgun metagenomic and other omics data.

Congratulations to Annarose for being awarded an Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) Mini Grant. This competitive grant funds Annarose to continue her research collaborating with the Vajda Lab on the fish gut microbiome upon exposure to environmental toxins.

Kayla Medina is presenting her Undergraduate Research contribution to the Golden Retriever Microbiome project this week at SACNAS 2020. This year’s conference is virtual, but Kayla is doing a great job representing the lab’s work in this format.

We are happy to share that we have been funded as part of the initial round of awardees for the CU Denver Presidential Initiative on Urban and Place-Based Research. Our project is a collaboration with Timberley Roane at CU Denver. The work will provide a genome-resolved mechanistic understanding of the biochemical metabolisms and microbial community ecosystem interactions that are responsible for 1,4-dioxane remediation at the Lowry Landfill bioremediation plant. This site in metro Denver is an important success story for bioremediation, and we hope to gain a mechanistic understanding of this success that improves site management and offers actionable insights for similar sites around the country.

We are very excited and grateful to receive DOE funding in order to improve computational biology methods for protein annotation. Our project will innovate upon and scale up expert curation approaches to create new bioinformatics tools that allow easy-to-use and metabolism-centric protein annotations. Our world-class collaborators on this project are Farnoush Banaei-Kashani, at CU Denver Computer Science and Engineering, Kelly Wrighton, at CSU, and Chris Henry, at Argonne National Labs.

CU Denver press release

Maria Nikulkova successfully defended her MS thesis today (and gave a great talk). Maria’s thesis is titled, “Novel genomes reveal phylogenetic breadth and metabolic insights for the candidate phylum Aenigmarchaeota.”

Maria is now off to do a PhD at NYU. Congratulations and best of luck, Maria!

Annarose Phelps has won 3rd place in the “Natural & Physical Sciences” category for her RaCAS 2020 poster. Congratulations, Annarose!

https://sites.google.com/view/racas2020/award-winners#h.7tdk6gaxirky

Annarose and Kayla both put together very nice posters and presentations to represent our work at the CU Denver Research and Creativer Activities Symposium. It’s hard not to be able to present our work in person right now, but both Annarose and Kayla represented our labs and their science well.