Dillman Lab

Congratulations to Kassandra Kin, who represented the lab by presenting a talk at the recent undergraduate symposium. Of 64 oral presentations over the two day symposium, Kassandra was honored with the prize for best oral presentation. Kassandra’s hard work, practice, and careful planning has been rewarded. In addition to this recent award, Kassandra was accepted into the Computational Entomology Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) over the summer here at UCR. We are excited to see what she learns over the summer. Keep up the excellent work!

Lauren Allison, Carter Gerke, Kassandra Kin, and Paul Medina are sophomore undergraduate students in the Dillman lab and all four are presenting research at the 11th annual Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity Symposium at UCR May 3rd and 4th. Congratulations to each of them. They have worked hard and we are excited to see where their experiments will take us.

 

Congratulations to Dihong, Dennis, and our collaborators in the Baldwin and Mortazavi labs. This paper, examining the identity and activity of proteins secreted by S. carpocapsae was two years in the making and lays an important foundation for future work. The paper was highlighted by UCR in a news article.

We just published the results of our PLoS One paper in the Science Journal for Kids. This is our first experience with this journal and we are excited to see the results of this work.
http://www.sciencejournalforkids.org/articles/why-are-some-parasites-picky-eaters
We think it is important to engage the public and to make science accessible and this seemed like a great way to do this. We are always looking for more ways to engage and welcome your feedback and ideas.

Congratulations to Dihong Lu, Dennis Chang, and our collaborators. Our manuscript, “Activated entomopathogenic nematode infective juveniles release lethal venom proteins,” was just accepted by PLoS Pathogens. The paper is scheduled for early release on April 20th. Great work!

Congratulations to Dennis Chang, for being awarded a travel scholarship to the Molecular Helminthology meeting in Cape Code this month!
https://www.elsevier.com/events/conferences/molecular-helminthology-an-integrated-approach/program

Be on the lookout for Dennis’s poster where he details our latest work in his poster: “The insect-parasitic nematode Steinernema carpocapsae releases a composition of lethal proteins inside hosts.” Good luck at the conference Dennis.

We have started posting some of our lab videos on our lab youtube site: https://www.youtube.com/user/Wormherder

Check it out for the latest videos of things we’re working on in the lab.

The Dillman lab will be participating in the Southern California nematode meeting WWAMO this Friday (Feb. 4, 2017) at Caltech. Dihong Lu will be talking about the nematode contribution to parasitism. It should be a great meeting!

A new paper was just published from the Dillman Lab. “Infective juveniles of the entomopathogenic nematode Steiernema scapterisci are preferentially activated by cricket tissue.” This was a collaborative effort between Dillman lab members Dihong Lu and Claudia Sepulveda. Congratulations on the fine work. This represents the first primary research article where all of the work was done in the Dillman lab. Here’s to many more!

Also, Tiffany Baiocchi is giving an oral presentation at the annual Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology this week. Good luck Tiffany!

3rd year graduate student Tiffany Baiocchi has passed her written and oral exams for Biochemistry. This means that she is now a PhD candidate. Way to go Tiffany!