Alvaro Mongui is a PhD!!!

Congrats to Alvaro Mongui Cruz who passed his PhD defense today!!
Mongui will receive his PhD from the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of the Andes, and I was the external reviewer on his committee. Alvaro also conducted a considerable amount of his research at Corpogem and will continue on there with his work to identify new methods for detecting novel bioactivities from metagenomic libraries.
Thanks to all of the wonderful people I met during my short stay in Bogota…sorry my Spanish was so terrible!

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Salamander symbiont…what’s it doing?

Intraerythrocytic bacteria (purple-stained bunches in left four-panel figure) in red-backed salamanders. The role of this microbe is unclear as infected salamanders did have elevated white blood cell counts but did not display any disease. Very cool!

No genome for this endosymbiont yet…anybody interested? Perhaps mining host “-ome” projects may turn up some valuable data. You know, sequences from those pesky “contaminant bacteria”.

New Findings from an Old Pathogen: Intraerythrocytic Bacteria (Family Anaplasmatacea) in Red-Backed Salamanders Plethodon cinereus

Andrew K. Davis, Jayna L. DeVore, Joseph R. Milanovich, Kristen Cecala, John C. Maerz, and Michael J. Yabsley EcoHealth 6, 219–228, 2009 DOI: 10.1007/s10393-009-0250-0