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!
Klein JA, Dave BM, Raphenya AR, McArthur AG, Knodler LA.
Mol Microbiol. 2017 Mar;103(6):973-991.
Type III Secretion Systems (T3SSs) are structurally conserved nanomachines that span the inner and outer bacterial membranes, and via a protruding needle complex contact host cell membranes and deliver type III effector proteins. T3SS are phylogenetically divided into several families based on structural basal body components. Here we have studied the evolutionary and functional conservation of four T3SS proteins from the Inv/Mxi-Spa family: a cytosolic chaperone, two hydrophobic translocators that form a plasma membrane-integral pore, and the hydrophilic ‘tip complex’ translocator that connects the T3SS needle to the translocon pore. Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium (S. Typhimurium), a common cause of food-borne gastroenteritis, possesses two T3SSs, one belonging to the Inv/Mxi-Spa family. We used invasion-deficient S. Typhimurium mutants as surrogates for expression of translocator orthologs identified from an extensive phylogenetic analysis, and type III effector translocation and host cell invasion as a readout for complementation efficiency, and identified several Inv/Mxi-Spa orthologs that can functionally substitute for the S. Typhimurium chaperone and translocator proteins. Functional complementation correlates with amino acid sequence identity between orthologs, but varies considerably between the four proteins. This is the first in-depth survey of the functional interchangeability of Inv/Mxi-Spa T3SS proteins acting directly at the host-pathogen interface.