We celebrated the end of another semester with a Lab Thanksgiving potluck, jointly with the LaBella lab. Everyone is ready for winter break, but still came out to support MyAsia’s poster as part of her OUR internship. Her poster stood out at the session, not only for being pink, but for her excellent delivery!
Over the past month, we had three students attend the SACNAS NDiSTEM meeting in Phoenix, AZ, and five students present at our Annual Biological Sciences Symposium, plus Dr. Carter’s talk at the 8th Partnership in Biocontrol, Biostimulants & Microbiome Congress. We are grateful for the funding from SACNAS, UNC Charlotte, and Global Engage to make our attendance at these events happen. It’s delightful to see so many in the lab getting to share their progress in various venues. While these are the outputs seen by our colleagues, first committee meetings and qualifying exams are also underway this semester. Hoping to get some of these projects into preprints soon!
The temperatures are cooling, leaves started turning, and we are one month into the Fall Semester! It’s been buzzing around here – quite literally, as undergrad Taylor started a collaborative project with the UNC Charlotte Botanical Gardens on bee dispersal of fungi in the gardens. We welcomed MyAsia Owens as a new undergrad through the Office of Undergraduate Research! Lots of fun updates to come as folks attend the SACNAS NDiSTEM meeting and the Partnership in Biocontrol, Biostimulants & Microbiome Congress this semester. Not to mention the brand new Mycology club on campus.
Our summer Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) students, Sara and Taylor, presented their summer projects in poster format during the end of summer symposium. Overcoming challenging, fast-paced courses while doing part-time lab work was definitely a test this summer. We are proud of what they accomplished!
I was honored to be chosen for the Schroth Faces of the Future symposium at the American Phytopathological Society. I presented a 40 minute talk in a session with other early career, amazing plant-microbe biologists. It was so fun to brag about our team and the work we’ve accomplished in just a year and a half! Grateful to the organizers and to APS and CIPHER for the travel funding to attend. -Morgan
We are so proud of Lauren Carneal, the lab technician, who is leaving to pursue her Ph.D. at Penn State in plant pathology. But also really sad to see her go! Lauren was the epitome of a helpful lab technician who worked on at least a little of every project in the lab, kept the chore chart going, and fostered a wonderfully collaborative environment. But don’t worry, we’re keeping a bit of her art/data here to be part of the lab. Can’t wait to follow her future success!
We’re starting new traditions left and right this summer. We popped the cork for our first paper from the lab being published, which includes new Mycetohabitans genomes and a lot of interesting sequence analysis of btl genes within them. Many more to go to fill our 4 L flask!!
This week we had our first annual Carter Lab Summit, an all day lab meeting with presentations by each lab member, discussions about electronic lab notebooks and the use of AI/LLMs, a journal article discussion, and ending with a tasty potluck. Amazing to see what everyone has accomplished in the short year that we’ve been growing microbes.
We were very grateful to the NC State Vegetable Pathology Lab for inviting us to see some of their summer field trials. Our road trip to Raleigh and back allowed Dallas and Paola to experience more applied plant pathology and see the impacts of the Fusarium spp. that they are working with in the lab. We are even more excited than we were to collaborate with Dr. Quesada and her team on some of the pathogens challenging North Carolina agriculture!
We’re starting to settle into a summer routine in the bustling CIPHER center. No more ghost town up here, it’s hopping! We’ve welcomed in two new undergraduates (Sara and Taylor) through the Office of Undergraduate Research and a rotation student (Caroline) from Bioinformatics, and a high school intern. Time to get some science done 🧪
We finished out Spring 2024 celebrating the B.Sc. graduation of lab members Tim Love and Aylha Pferschy! Aylha will be continuing in the lab as an early entry masters student.
We had a joint lab BBQ with Lab LaBella from Bioinformatics and then an impromptu birthday lunch the week after graduation. The calm before a busy summer!!
