Chih-Yun will join the lab in January 2023 as a Research Assistant. She will initially be helping to test our frozen culture collection for viability after a -80 freezer failure, but will likely continue to work on new questions as well. We are happy to have you!
Congratulations to Jessica and Jacob for passing their Comprehensive Exams!
Big congratulations to our new PhD candidates, who recently passed their comps. They did really well, and are making great progress in their PhDs.
Welcome to Elle and Adedotun!
We are thrilled to have two new graduate students in the lab - Elle in the EEB PhD program and Adedotun in the Biology Masters program.
Two new pitcher plant papers out!
Our lab group recently published two new papers about pitcher plant-associated communities. Check them out:
Heil, J.A., Wolock, C.J., Pierce, N.E., Pringle, A, and Bittleston, L.S. 2022. Sarracenia pitcher plant-associated microbial communities differ primarily by host species across a longitudinal gradient. Environmental Microbiology https://doi.org/10.1111/1462-2920.15993
Bittleston, L.S., Benson, E.L., Bernardin, J.R. and Pierce, N.E. 2022. Characterization and comparison of convergence among Cephalotus follicularis pitcher plant-associated communities with those of Nepenthes and Sarracenia found worldwide. Front. Plant Sci. 13:887635. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2022.887635
Jacob and Jessica both helped move these papers forward, starting with data that I gathered during my PhD. It’s great to see the findings finally published!
PI Meeting in Florida for NSF Pitcher Plant Project
We had a great meeting in Florida to hash out details for our Sarracenia purpurea microbiome project and our big sampling effort this summer.
The Team
Lovely visit and talk from Dr. Lauren Shoemaker
It was great to have Dr. Lauren Shoemaker visit our lab group and give a departmental seminar this past April.
Lauren and Leonora in the sagebrush
Congratulations to Jessica for Redfield Fellowship!
Jessica won the Redfield Graduate Fellowship from BSU’s Department of Biological Sciences, and will be awarded funds to use for her fieldwork this summer.
Congratulations to Jacob for the Graduate College Mentoring Award!
PhD student Jacob Heil won the Boise State Graduate College Mentoring Award, and we celebrated at the ceremony, where Jessica was also recognized for her 3 Minute Thesis win.
Jacob Heil, Leonora Bittleston and Jessica Bernardin
New paper out in eLife
Our paper just came out in eLife last week: https://elifesciences.org/articles/74987! Only the abstract is up right now, but the full paper should be published soon. This paper, titled “Interactions between strains govern the eco-evolutionary dynamics of microbial communities” examines bacteria from pitcher plant communities at the strain level and finds that strains with very little genomic separation (~100 SNPs) can have different growth dynamics. Furthermore, most of the interactions (correlations) among taxa occur at the strain, and not the ASV, level. The analysis and writing for this paper was led by Dr. Akshit Goyal, a Physics of Living Systems Fellow at MIT.
Jessica wins 2nd place in BSU 3 Minute Thesis competition!
PhD student Jessica Bernardin recently competed in Boise State’s 3 Minute Thesis competition, and won 2nd place! You can watch her talk here: https://youtu.be/9Qj_nHeAea0?t=3602 and learn more about the microbial communities in pitcher plants. She will be giving her talk again next week at the state finals. Go Jessica!