Lab News

April 20, 2024

Undergraduate student, Neo Peng, has been offered admission to the Graduate Program in Biomedical Sciences (PhD) at Oregon Health & Science University. He is planning to do research towards the cure for HIV at the Oregon National Primate Research Center, which is one of the 7 nationally ranked primate research centers in the US. He is excited to start his PhD program in Fall 2024 at OHSU!

March 22, 2024

Christina Egami and Caison Warner were both awarded a bursary from the International Symposium on Plasmid Biology (ISPB). This ISPB bursary was awarded to assist Early Career Researchers on their attendance to the 2024 symposium, being hosted in Hamamatsu, Japan! Christina’s abstract is titled, “Method for efficient quantification of short-term plasmid loss kinetics”, and Caison’s abstract is titled, “Establishing the Accuracy of a Plasmid Assembly Pipeline for Short-Read Sequence Contigs through PFGE Gel Mobility Size Verification”.

November 20, 2023

Christina Egami was one of six who was awarded a seed grant to perform her proposed study titled: “Identification of bioactive compounds interfering with plasmid maintenance” by the UCSC Chemical Screening Center.  Christina is a 4th year PhD student working on mechanisms regulating multicopy plasmid segregation, which is a critical determinant of plasmid stability. Multicopy plasmids are critical for the dissemination of antibiotic resistance and virulence. Bioactive compounds that promote plasmid loss are thus excellent candidates for controlling the spread of antibiotic resistance and for the development of antivirulence therapies. Check out the seed fund announcement! 

December 25, 2023

The Camps Lab wishes you a happy holiday!


October 18, 2023

Manel Camps gives a talk at the Research Division of El Bosque University in Bogotá, which hosts a major medical center in Bogotá, Colombia. His talk was titled “Evolution of New Biochemical Activities: Experimental Models of Antibiotic and Antitumor Chemotherapy Resistance”.


October 9, 2023

We’re excited to share our latest publication: Strain belonging to an emerging, virulent sublineage of ST131 Escherichia coli isolated in fresh spinach, suggesting that ST131 may be transmissible through agricultural products

Escherichia coli residing in the intestine can cause severe disease if it colonizes internal organs. In collaboration with Dr. Rocha’s group in Puebla (Mexico), we identify one of these pathogenic strains in a sample of fresh spinach, map it to an emerging, highly virulent sublineage, and define its genomic markers. This work shows that pathogenic strains can be transmitted by agricultural products and provides the tools for both a more rigorous epidemiological surveillance of E. coli and for a better understanding of its routes of transmission.

September 27, 2023

Ph.D candicate, Amanda Carbajal, has been awarded the highly selective Yale Ciencia Academy (YCA) Fellowship. This competitive fellowship selects applicants nationwide, and is a program dedicated to providing fellows support in their transition to a post-PhD position. See the full list of 2023 YCA fellows and check out the UCSC graduate announcement article. Congratulations Amanda!!

 

June 20, 2023

Check out our research outreach article- From friend to foe: Food strains share their toxic genes in E. coli