Lab News

2024-2025: Too busy to update the lab website! Some of our accomplishments this year:

  • Cyrille Date and Nitee Rai were awarded research funding from the Undergraduate Research Center. Cyrille was also awarded a Tri Beta grant. Congrats!!
  • Our first M.S. student in Biological Sciences, Maxwell Awuah, began his thesis work in the lab, working on antibiotic resistance and comparative genomics in gut microbes.
  • Nitee Rai presented a poster at the statewide Posters At St. Paul symposium in March.
  • Keyur Karmacharya and Cyrille Date presented their projects at the National Conference for Undergraduate Research in Pittsburgh, PA.
  • Abrham Eshete got our amplicon sequencing workflow up and running and got our first library sequenced at the U of M.
  • All 7 undergraduate students in the lab presented at the campus Undergraduate Research Symposium, and graduated 2 weeks later! We are proud of them!!
  • Dr. Natalie Melendez Vazquez visited the lab from the University of Puerto Rico to work with Dr. Noecker on multi-omic microbiome analysis. It was a productive visit!

Collage of students at the URS, eating smoothies, graduating

Summer 2024 updates:

  • Our Coy is set up! Lots of happy anaerobic culturing ahead.
  • A new review article out with Dr. Peter Turnbaugh in Nature Metabolism, on tools for studying metabolism in the gut microbiome. Read more here: http://rdcu.be/dMBZ0
  • Dr. Noecker presented about our research at the Beneficial Microbes meeting in Madison, Wisconsin

April 2024: We had a busy spring:

  • The whole lab presented at the campus Undergraduate Research Symposium and the inaugural Biological Sciences Research Symposium, a new celebration of student research in our department.
  • Cyrille won an Outstanding Presentation Award at the URS!
  • Kendall defended her Honors portfolio!
  • Gionna, Kendall, and Hope graduated!

Students with posters at the Undergraduate research symposium

November 2023: Our first lab meeting was a success!

Students at lab meeting

October 2023: Dr. Noecker presented about our research at the ISB Virtual Microbiome Symposium and at the St. Olaf College Biology Seminar.

October 2023: Gionna and Kendall were awarded funding for their projects from the Undergraduate Research Center. Congrats to them!!

August 2023: Hello world!