Check out this Tessa’s new publication testing field-friendly methods for preserving RNA viruses, like SIV, in primate feces. Co-authors on the work are Rajni Shukla, Christopher Madden, Yael Vodovotz, Amit Sharma, and Vanessa Hale. Way to go all!
https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/msphere.00484-23
Zach features work that he and Angela Scott conducted on optimizing approaches to studying the canine urobiome at the annual Veterinary Cancer Society meeting in Reno, Nevada.
He also won $1.70 at the slot machines! (But we won’t say how much he lost.)
Hello, lovely Reno!
Tessa Wilde is this year’s Hale Lab MVPoop winner! The MVPoop mug of glory was passed on from Angela Scott (2022’s MVPoop winner) to Tessa in recognition of Tessa’s huge personal and professional accomplishments this year, from becoming a mom, to winning the Presidential Fellowship, to winning several awards and funding in relation to Tessa’s non-profit, For the Love of Primates. What a year! Great job Tessa!
2022 MVPoop award Winner, Angela Scott, who stepped in and stepped up as our lab manager and has demonstrated excellence in science and in keeping our lab on top of things! 
Zach Lewis was featured in the Infectious Diseases Institute Newsletter for receiving a Trainee Enrichment Award. Tessa Cannon Wilde was featured in The Lantern, the Ohio State student newspaper, for her recent purchase of 60 acres of land in Crooksville, OH, which will become the future home of a primate sanctuary for retired laboratory monkeys. Learn more about Tessa’s nonprofit, For the Love of Primates, here.
The One Welfare and Sustainability Center (OWSC) launch included a day of presentations featuring students, faculty, and community partners. The Center is supported by Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton. Zach Lewis shared collaborative research examining the alligator gut microbiome and gastrointestinal health of farmed alligators. These delicious cookies were part of the sweet celebration highlighting an intersection of passions – LVMH and OSU – around and sustainability and animal health.
The Hale Lab is getting ready for more fun with microbes! Dr. Vanessa Hale was awarded a 5-year NIH Career Development Grant titled “Bladders and biomes: Environmental compounds as modifiers of microbiomes, metabolomes, and urothelium.” This work will focus on studying how gut and urine microbes metabolize environmental chemicals like benzo[a]pyrene (a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon) and what impacts this metabolism has on the bladder.
Check out this recent publication in Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine by Andrew McGlynn and Ryan Mrofchak longitudinally assessing urine pH, specific gravity, culture, antimicrobial resistance, protein profiles in healthy dogs over 3 months.
Look how variable urine pH is over time! Takeaway: Assess urine pH using a pH meter at multiple time points before making clinical recommendations or changes.
The Hale lab crew, and their supporters… they are amazing! Here’s to science, to microbes, and most of all, to the young scientists, with whom we briefly share an orbit, who will show us the future.
Simian Immunodeficiency Virus and Storage Buffer: Field-friendly preservation methods for RNA viral detection in primate feces. Bravo to the whole team for all of the efforts that went into this study:
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What did we do during the pandemic? Assemble a huge team of scientists to test for SARS-CoV-2 in animals and the environment – everywhere outside of humans.
Two publications resulting from our animal testing were just released:
SARS-CoV-2 Serological Investigation of White-Tailed Deer in Northeastern Ohio
