Congrats to the freshman biology students in my Introductory Biology lab section (Biol126) on their recent publication! Students in the class isolated bacteria from soil samples from Geneseo, NY, classified them, and tested their ability to produce antibiotics under different conditions. They found three strains that inhibited the growth of Neisseria commensals, close relatives of important human pathogens. We ultimately hope that these compounds will also inhibit the growth of gonococcal strains, providing potential new antimicrobial therapies for treatment of gonorrhea. 

https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mra.00627-22

I am so excited to see this work finally published! This study was designed and conducted by the students in my Genomics class at RIT during the fall semester of 2020. In this work, students experimentally evolved resistance to an antibiotic in a Neisseria commensal species. They then sequenced the genomes of resistant lineages and found mutations that caused resistance converged on short sequence duplication events in ribosomal genes. Since Neisseria commensals share resistance with their pathogenic relatives (one of which is the bacterial pathogen that causes gonorrhea), it is important to understand the paths to resistance in these species too!
Congrats to all involved!  An especially big thank you to André O. Hudson for your help and guidance!

​https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0262370

A big congratulations to RIT students Michael Foire and Jordan Raisman on their new preprint (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.30.228593v1)! This work characterizes resistance across the commensal Neisseria, which are known sources of resistance for their pathogenic cousin, Neisseria gonorrhoeae. Using both MIC testing and whole genome sequencing, several resistance-encoding mutations are nominated in non-pathogenic species. 

Congratulations to collaborators on the publication of "Rapid inference of antibiotic resistance and susceptibility by genomic neighbor typing" in Nature Microbiology! Here we present a new method for identifying resistant bacteria within minutes (<10 min), using real-time Nanopore sequencing and phenotypic inference from near phylogenetic neighbors. One step closer to point of care resistance diagnostics which will enable tailored therapies for individual patients! Check it out here: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-019-0656-6.

The lab is finally coming together, and I am so excited to get started with my incoming students this semester. I can not wait to see the paths we will take towards discovery, the unexpected challenges and creative solutions used to overcome these obstacles, and the team that we will build. Here's to the future, watch out gonococcus!