Today we say farewell to Arjun Sharma & Suman Virdee. Arjun joined the lab as a second year volunteer, staying to perform a Biochem 3R06 research project. He has been very active in our Comprehensive Antibiotic Resistance Database project, co-developing our CARD*Shark text mining tools for computer-guided curation of literature in PubMed, pipelines for our clinical isolate genome sequencing work, and developing novel algorithms for predicting glycopeptide resistance from genome assemblies. He was the recipient of an IIDR Summer Student Fellowship and leaves the Biochemistry program to enter medical school at the University of Toronto. Suman joined the lab in the 4th year of the Biomedical Discovery & Commercialization program, performing her thesis research on RNA-Seq bioinformatics workflows in a collaboration between our lab and the laboratory of Dr. Kristen Hope (McMaster Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute), extending her research into the summer by winning a CIHR Summer Undergraduate Research Award. Suman finished her degree and this September starts in the McMaster Master of Science in Global Health program. Bon chance Suman & Arjun!
We haven’t been travelling much this year, but our collaborators have been busy!
Dearborn, D.C., A.B. Gager, A.G. McArthur, M.E. Gilmour, E. Mandzhukova, R.A. Mauck. 2017. How to get diverse MHC genotypes without disassortative mating. Presentation at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, New Orleans, Louisiana.
McLean, M., D. Theriault, M. Kelley, B.A. Lago, A.G. McArthur, & L. Williams. 2017. Role of Nfe2 and pro-oxidant exposure in inner ear development in zebrafish. Presentation at the Society of Toxicology 56rd Annual Meeting, Baltimore, Maryland.
Williams, L.M., B.A. Lago, A.G. McArthur, A.R. Raphenya, N. Pray, N. Saleem, S. Salas, K. Paulson, R.S. Mangar, Y. Liu, A.H. Vo, & J.A. Shavit. 2017. The transcription factor, Nuclear factor, erythroid 2 (Nfe2), is a regulator of the oxidative stress response during Danio rerio development. Presentation at the Society of Toxicology 56rd Annual Meeting, Baltimore, Maryland.
Winsor, G.L., C. Bertelli, K.K. Tsang, B. Alcock, A.G. McArthur, & F.S.L. Brinkman. 2017. Pseudomonas Genome Database 2017: Improved gene/AMR/VF/genomic island annotations, comparative genome analyses, and a platform for facilitating public health genomic epidemiology. Presentation at the 16th International Conference on Pseudomonas, Liverpool, United Kingdom.
Anastasia joins us & the IIDR for Summer 2017 from the Center for Genomic Sciences, UNAM, Cuernavaca, Mexico as part of her successful competition for a Mitacs Globalink Internship. Throughout the summer, she will be working on data and algorithm development for antimicrobial resistance genomic surveillance. Welcome Anastasia!
Well done Kara! The OGS is a provincial merit-based scholarship, with awards available to graduate students in all disciplines of academic study, while the MacDATA Graduate Fellowship Program is part of McMaster’s new MacDATA Institute. Learn more about Kara’s Masters research on antimicrobial resistance genomics here.
Congratulations Arjun (top right)! See the details here.
Congratulations to our 3rd year Biochemistry & Biomedical Sciences students upon completion of their research projects! Both will be staying on as summer research students.
Tammy Lau – The Importance of Protocol Design for RNA-Seq in the Ongoing Development of a Novel Technology for Tissue Specific Gene Expression Profiling in C. elegans
Arjun Sharma – The Glycopeptide Resistance Predictor
Congratulations to this year’s crop of BiomedDC 4A15 thesis students for 8 month research projects well done! From left to right:
Suman Virdee – Developing a Galaxy based Pipeline for RNA-Seq Analysis in Stem Cell Biology
Kirill Pankov – The Cytochrome P450 (CYP) Superfamily in the Cnidarian Phylum
Jonsson Liu – Clinical virulence detection and Clostridium difficile clonality
Annie Cheng – Predicting Plasmid-Mediated Antimicrobial Resistance from Whole Genome Sequencing
Godwin Chan – Using the Galaxy Platform to Increase Accessibility for Structure Determination via Cryo-Electron Microscopy
Congratulations to 4th Year Biomedical Discovery & Commercialization student and McArthur lab member Suman Virdee for her CIHR Undergraduate Summer Studentship Award for her summer project “Development and implementation of computational tools to dissect cancer stem cell circuitry”, a joint project between our laboratory and that of Dr. Kristin Hope!