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Congratulations to Dr. Joseph Mougous on his HHMI Investigator status renewed for another 7 years! Professor Mougous, who became an HHMI investigator in 2015 runs a research lab making ground-breaking discoveries in microbiology. The lab focuses on secretion systems that deliver toxic proteins to neighboring bacterial cells, bacterial interactions in the human gut, novel toxin activities in diverse bacteria, and secreted virulence factors that subvert host cell defenses and facilitate infection. More on Dr. Mougous’ work can be found here.
Scientists in Washington researching COVID-19 Omicron variant to help protect public
"The alarming thing is we didn’t see a lot of these mutations in related viruses. Usually viruses accumulate mutations over time, and so we could kind of track as mutations emerge, and we see more and more over time. But there was this gap, and as soon Omicron was sequenced, all of these new mutations popped up. So, there’s a lot of questions going around as to how that happened," said Dr. Jesse Erasmus, acting assistant professor at UW Medicine.
The Department of Microbiology is also conducting a second search for a full-time (12 month) Assistant Teaching Professor. If interested, apply here.
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Recent Publications
- An international, interlaboratory ring trial confirms the feasibility of an extraction-less "direct" RT-qPCR method for reliable detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in clinical samples.
PloS one - , 2022
Mills MG, Bruce E, Huang ML, Crothers JW, Hyrien O, Oura CAL, Blake L, Brown Jordan A, Hester S, Wehmas L, Mari B, Barby P, Lacoux C, Fassy J, Vial P, Vial C, Martinez JRW, Oladipo OO, Inuwa B, Shittu I, Meseko CA, Chammas R, Santos CF, Dionísio TJ, Garbieri TF, Parisi VA, Mendes-Correa MC, de Paula AV, Romano CM, Góes LGB, Minoprio P, Campos AC, Cunha MP, Vilela APP, Nyirenda T, Mkakosya RS, Muula AS, Dumm RE, Harris RM, Mitchell CA, Pettit S, Botten J, Jerome KR - Enzyme engineering and testing of a formate reduction pathway.
Synthetic biology (Oxford, England) - , 2021
Wang J, Anderson K, Yang E, He L, Lidstrom ME - A viral histone-like protein exploits antagonism between linker histones and HMGB proteins to obstruct the cell cycle.
Current biology : CB - Dec, 2021
Lynch KL, Dillon MR, Bat-Erdene M, Lewis HC, Kaai RJ, Arnold EA, Avgousti DC - Viral recombination systems limit CRISPR-Cas targeting through the generation of escape mutations.
Cell host & microbe - 10, 2021
Hossain AA, McGinn J, Meeske AJ, Modell JW, Marraffini LA - How a broadly neutralizing antibody grapples with antigenic and conformational diversity in dengue virus.
Cell - 12, 2021
Lee KK