Sannidhi Mennon, Research Associate Mortimer Lab, Lawrence Berkeley Lab Sannidhi Mennon, an RA in the Mortimer lab, won a prize for most effective flash talk at the recent EGDB divisional annual meeting. Sannidhi described work she's doing as part of the m-CAFEs SFA. Brachypodium distachyon is a model grass closely related to essential food and fuel crops such as wheat, sorghum and switchgrass. Transgenic B.distachyon is a valuable tool for studying the genetics of … [Read more...]
m-CAFEs in 2nd Annual BioEPIC SLAM
Four members of the m-CAFEs team recently participated in a virtual Research Slam promoting science related to the BioEPIC facility. Trent Northen, lead scientist, gave an overview presentation about the SFA. He was joined by m-CAFEs team members Manuel Villalobos, a postdoctoral researcher in the Glass Lab at UC Berkeley, and Avery Roberts, a graduate student in the Barrangou Lab at North Carolina State University. Manual and Avery presented their research and competed for the honor of Slam … [Read more...]
m-CAFEs Jillian Banfield awarded 2023 Van Leeuwenhoek Medal for impactful contribution to science
The Royal Netherlands Society for Microbiology (KNVM) recognizes m-CAFEs principal investigator Jillian Banfield with the ‘2023 Van Leeuwenhoek Medal’ for her impactful contributions to the understanding of complex microbial communities and their interaction with the environment. Her pioneering work on groundbreaking technologies such as genome-resolved metagenomics and community proteomics to study diverse communities of bacteria, archaea, and phages, has led to the addition of complete new … [Read more...]
Demonstrating CRISPR delivery under controlled conditions in fabricated ecosystem EcoFAB
This post is a repost of a North Carolina State University press release: In Ironic Twist, CRISPR System Used to Befuddle Bacteria Image courtesy of Rodolphe Barrangou, rbarran@ncsu.edu North Carolina State University Base editing within a community context. (A) An EcoFAB device filled with quartz sand (Left) and an EcoFAB device loaded with LB and synthetic soil community (Right). (B) EcoFAB community editing strategy overview. (C) Blue or white E. coli colonies resulting from synthetic … [Read more...]
Broad-spectrum CRISPR-Cas13a enables efficient phage genome editing
Scientists from the Innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley, North Carolina State University and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab use RNA-targeting CRISPR systems to drive genome editing across phage diversity. Image courtesy of Davian Ho: CRISPR-Cas13 creates an evolutionary bottleneck by targeting the RNA of diverse phages, allowing for edited phages (orange) to be specifically enriched. Bacterial viruses (bacteriophages or phages) are estimated to be among the most diverse and … [Read more...]
