News

Mikhail Shapiro Named HHMI Investigator: Mikhail Shapiro, professor of chemical engineering, has been named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator. He is one of 33 scientists named as investigators this year by HHMI, a nonprofit medical research organization founded by the late billionaire, engineer, pilot, and movie producer Howard Hughes. Shapiro is joining approximately 250 other scientists who have been named as investigators to date. [View article]

A Census of the Soil Microbiome: In our changing climate, a thorough understanding of healthy soil microbiomes will lead to more resilient crops and thus more sustainable food sources. Now, a team led by Caltech researchers has developed a new computational technique for analyzing the DNA present within a soil sample in order to survey the microbial species present. The technique has revealed new insights into the bacterial species that protect plants from pathogenic fungi. The work was done in the laboratory of Dianne Newman, Gordon M. Binder/Amgen Professor of Biology and Geobiology and executive officer for molecular biology. Newman is the Ecology and Biosphere Engineering Initiative Lead at Caltech's Resnick Sustainability Institute. [View article]

Kaihang Wang recipient of an NIH Director's New Innovator Award: [View website]

Victoria Orphan elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS): Victoria J. Orphan, Caltech's James Irvine Professor of Environmental Science and Geobiology and the director of the Center for Environmental Microbial Interactions (CEMI), has been honored as new members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS). [View article]

Deprived of Oxygen, Layers of Bacteria Get Creative: Bacteria are found living nearly everywhere on our planet, from the inside of human intestines to the soil to deep underwater. When scientists study bacteria in the lab, they most often examine individual bacterial cells as they grow rapidly in liquid cultures. However, bacteria in nature usually exist in the form of structures called biofilms—dense populations of cells attached to each other and to surfaces with a matrix of sticky goo. [View article]

Bacteria with Metal Diet Discovered in Dirty Glassware: "These are the first bacteria found to use manganese as their source of fuel," says Jared Leadbetter, professor of environmental microbiology at Caltech who, in collaboration with postdoctoral scholar Hang Yu, describes the findings in the July 16 issue of the journal Nature. "A wonderful aspect of microbes in nature is that they can metabolize seemingly unlikely materials, like metals, yielding energy useful to the cell." [Nature article] [Caltech article]

CEMI director, Dianne Newman, elected to NAS: Dianne Newman is the Gordon M. Binder/Amgen Professor of Biology and Geobiology and the Allen V. C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair of Caltech's Center for Environmental Microbial Interactions. She has been elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The announcement was made Tuesday, April 30. [Caltech Article] [National Academy of Science] [Caltech Twitter]

Paper Featured in Nature Communications Editors’ Highlights: Our recent paper entitled 'DNA interference and beyond: structure and functions of prokaryotic Argonaute proteins' was featured on the Nature Communications Editors’ Highlights on genomes and epigenomes. [Nature Communications Editors’ Highlights]

Frances Arnold Wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry: Frances H. Arnold, the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry, has won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "the directed evolution of enzymes," according to the award citation. Directed evolution, pioneered by Arnold in the early 1990s, is a bioengineering method for creating new and better enzymes in the laboratory using the principles of evolution. Today, the method is used in hundreds of laboratories and companies that make everything from laundry detergents to biofuels to medicines. Enzymes created with the technique have replaced toxic chemicals in many industrial processes. [Caltech article]

Biomass Distribution on Earth: The composition of the biosphere is a fundamental question in biology, yet a global quantitative account of the biomass of each taxon is still lacking. We assemble a census of the biomass of all kingdoms of life. This analysis provides a holistic view of the composition of the biosphere and allows us to observe broad patterns over taxonomic categories, geographic locations, and trophic modes. [PNAS article] [AP News article]

Ismagilov Lab Awarded CARB-X Grant: MAY 2018 – Ismagilov Lab has been awarded a grant by CARB-X (Combatting Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria), a consortium organized by Boston University that includes federal sponsors (BARDA, NIH and the Wellcome Trust). Under CARB-X funding, Ismagilov Lab aims to develop a rapid, phenotypic antibiotic susceptibility test (AST) for Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which is high on the World Health Organization’s Priority Bacterial Pathogens list. This CARB-X project will build upon the digital AST (dAST) that was invented in Ismagilov Lab (see Schoepp et al. 2017 and Schoepp et al. 2016). The dAST uses ultrasensitive detection of changes in nucleic acids to determine whether a pathogen is susceptible to a particular antibiotic. Current lab members who have contributed to this work or will be contributing to this work include (in alphabetical order): Jacob Barlow, Matthew Curtis, Erik Jue, Tahmineh Khazaei, Eugenia Khorosheva, Eric Liaw, Emily Savela, and Nathan Schoepp.

Solving Pieces of the Genetic Puzzle: How many noncoding regions on DNA function has been a complete mystery, but a new technique helps shed light on what they do. [Caltech article]

Why we need erasable MRI scans: New technology could allow MRI contrast agents to "blink off," helping doctors diagnose disease [Caltech article]

John McCutcheon visits CEMI: John McCutcheon will be visiting CEMI on sabbatical from the University of Montana from 18 April to 30 June 2018. He is interested in symbioses involving bacteria, fungi, and insects, with particular focus on the evolutionary, genomic, and cell biological processes that govern these interactions. He is excited to meet as many people as possible during his sabbatical, so contact him if you are interested in chatting (john.mccutcheon@umontana.edu).

Victoria Orphan gives Watson Lecture: Dr. Orphan talked about the activities of marine microorganisms from the ocean surface to deep in the earth's crust, considering the globally important geochemical processes they orchestrate through metabolic collaboration in a Watson lecture entitled "Microbial Life Support: The Invisible Living Networks That Shape Our Oceans." [YouTube video]

Entomologist Joe Parker: A Conversation with Caltech Entomologist Joe Parker [Caltech article & video]; How a Common Beetle May Offer Deep Insights Into Evolution [New York Times article & video]

Thanks to Kim and Ginger Caldwell for endowing a CEMI graduate student fellowship!: We are very grateful to Kim and Ginger Caldwell, long time Caltech associates, for choosing to endowing a CEMI graduate student fellowship. Their generous support will benefit a CEMI student every year, chosen annually in the fall.