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!!
This semester, the Carter lab hosted four students from the Charlotte Early Engineering College as they worked on a mock start-up. They worked in the lab culturing various common fungi on plastic and media to investigate plastic degradation. Congrats to Nathan, Sidney, Max, and Kylie on a winning presentation at their Senior Expo showing off their Fungi Fusion prototype!
Graduate students Dallas and Bhuwan volunteered at Science on the Rocks, a science outreach event geared towards adults and hosted by the Discovery Place. They brought along with them some of our more charismatic fungi for people to see what fungi look like beyond Mario mushrooms and fairy rings. Our more colorful isolates were definitely the crowd favorites!!
Dr. Carter attended the Fungal Genetics meeting for the first time and what an incredible experience. She presented a poster on our recent preprint and came back to the lab with great new ideas and connections.
During the last week of February 2024, Lauren, Dallas, and Bhuwan represented the Carter Lab at the Southern Division meeting of the American Phytopathological Society in Columbia, South Carolina. Dallas presented her search for endofungal bacteria in important plant pathogens. We are grateful for the USDA support for this project and for funding their participation in this meeting!
The Carter Lab participated in the annual Research Meet & Greet hosted by the graduate students of the Department of Biological Sciences. Undergrads from around campus were invited to connect with labs and learn more about research on campus. We loved connecting with new potential lab members and other interested students!
And kudos to the grad students for their hard work in hosting this event!