We’d like to congratulate all of the undergraduate seniors that are graduating this month! That includes Christian Bowman, Lauren Braun, Shyon Nasrolahi, and Hector Villa. We wish all of you well in your academic and professional endeavors. We also note that Lauren Braun finished her honors capstone project through her project on entomopathogenic nematode behavior and will be graduating with honors. (Picture below shows Lauren & Dr. Dillman at the UCR honors banquet.)
Congratulations to Valentina and Shyon on the publication of their work on EPN activation. This research effort was led by Valentina and is the culmination of research that she’s been doing in the lab since January 2017. Shyon joined the project in January of this year and was able to make a significant contribution to this project. We support helping undergraduates publish their research.
We are thrilled to have our Specialty Crop Multi-State Program Grant funded by the USDA. Congratulations to Irma De Ley for all of her hard work on slug-parasitic nematodes over the years. We are excited to be working with her and our collaborators at Oregon State University on this project.
https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Specialty_Crop_Competitiveness_Grants/SCMP.html
In collaboration with the Mortazavi lab at UC Irvine, we optimized a protocol for performing RNA-seq on single nematodes. The protocol was published today in Bio-protocol. Congratulations to Dennis and Dihong from our lab, and Lorrayne, Marissa, Katherine, and Rabi from the Mortazavi lab. This protocol should be useful to fellow nematologists and worm herders.
https://bio-protocol.org/e2729
Undergraduate students Valentina Alonso, Lauren Braun, Kassandra Kin, and Nathan Mercado each presented research at the annual Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. The meeting was in San Francisco this year and the students had a great time. Their hard work paid off as they were able to present their research and learn about some of the exciting things being done in integrative and comparative biology.
From left to right (Lauren Braun, Kassandra Kin, Valentina Alonso, and Nathan Mercado).
Today our study of the X. innexi genome was published in BMC Genomics. Sudarshan Aryal, who is now a Senior Scientist in Nematology at Marrone Bio Innovations, was 2nd author on the paper. Specialist parasites are particularly interesting and Steinernema scapterisci is one of the few known specialist EPN parasites. We were interested to find that its bacterial symbiont, X. innexi, seems to be virtually avirulent to insect hosts, suggesting that the nematodes no longer rely on the bacteria to kill their insect hosts. Congratulations Sudarshan and our collaborators on this nice genomic study.
