Tag: Invasion biology

The shift to October marked the last days that our visiting doctoral student Adriana Osińska spent in the lab. Adriana was working on the sequencing data generated from the invasion experiments I performed in Jo Handelsman’s lab. She managed to dig out a great number of genes that seems to have an influence on bacterial community invasion success. Those genes are now candidate genes that will be tested in follow-up studies, which brings us to….

That I forgot to introduce our newest lab member – Emil Burman! Emil is a master student performing his thesis project in the lab and will stay with us until May 2020. Emil will work on experimentally characterizing the candidate genes that Adriana has identified. We are excited to have Emil in the lab and think that he has been off to a great start already. Welcome Emil!

Adriana will no go back to Poland to complete here PhD thesis early next year. We have loved to have her in the lab and she has contributed with data and analyses of tremendous value. We wish her all the best of luck with defending her thesis!

So 2017 has begun, and this year will bring new challenges and exciting opportunities. First of all, my application for a 3.5 year grant from the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (FORMAS) to go to Prof. Jo Handelsman‘s lab in the US was granted. Since Prof. Handelsman in is moving her lab to University of Wisconsin in Madison, where she will be heading the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery (after returning from the White House), it means that this summer I will be moving to Wisconsin. I will retain a link to the University of Gothenburg and the Joakim Larsson lab though, and part of the grant is actually for covering my salary after returning from the US, so Gothenburg won’t get rid of me so easily.

The granted project will use high-throughput sequencing techniques to identify genes improving colonization and invasion ability or resistance to invasion in microbial communities, using a model system developed by the Handelsman lab. The project will focus on genes important for colonization, invasion and resistance to invasion under exposure to sub-lethal antibiotics concentrations. The project will contribute important knowledge towards the understanding of microbial colonization and invasion and highlight disturbances to the interactions in microbial communities caused by anthropogenic activities. In addition, the results of the project will hopefully allow for prediction of secondary effects of antibiotic exposure in the environment, and the preparation for future challenges related to infections with pathogenic bacteria. The project has already been highlighted by CARe (although this was before Jo announced her move from Yale) and a FORMAS press release (in Swedish).

The project will go under the acronym InSiDER, and I intend to write about it in a special section of the website, called the Wisconsin Blog. My intention is to include personal reflections on life in Wisconsin and work in the Handelsman lab there, but we’ll see how those plans turn out. Anyway, I am very thankful for FORMAS funding this project and giving me the opportunity to work with one of the leading scientists within microbial ecology in the world!