Dr. Dillman was a guest on a podcast for the very first time. It was an episode of Something Offbeat and the podcast episode dropped today. The episode was based on a recent article detailing a case of Ophidascaris robertsi infection in a human brain.
Tag: Dillman lab
Jake & Sophia Graduate
Sophia Parks and Jacob Schurkman were hooded in a graduation hooding ceremony over the weekend, completing their doctoral studies. Sophia is the 3rd graduate student to graduate from the Dillman lab and Jake is the 4th. Sophia started a postdoctoral position at Stanford in December and Jake begins a fulltime position at Maine Molecular Quality Controls later this year. Congratulations on their hard work and success!!
Chancellor’s Award for Excellence
Parasitologist Adler Dillman and cell biologist Manuela Martins-Green are this year’s recipients of UC Riverside’s Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement. The award is presented every spring to faculty members with a distinguished record of fostering undergraduate research or creative activity.
Collaborative study with the Nair and Lo labs published
We have entered into a collaboration with Meera Nair’s lab at UCR studying host-parasite interactions using Nippostrongylus brasiliensis as a model. Our first collaborative paper was just published. In this study, we investigated the role of host-derived RELMα in a nematode infection. RELMα is a protein secreted during a type 2 immune response. Our lab is excited to be working with nematode parasites of mammals and we look forward to a long and fruitful collaboration with the Nair lab.
Congratulations to our graduating seniors!
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.)
New paper published by undergraduate researchers
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.
Project on Slug-Parasitic Nematodes Funded
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
Single-nematode RNA-seq protocol published!
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
Undergraduates represent our lab at SICB
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).
Genome of X. innexi published!
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.
