Updates

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 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!

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!

We’re already finding that the fun of an academic lab is that as one person rotates out, another comes in. So we are excited to welcome new undergraduate researcher Paola Diaz-Matamoros who will be working with Dallas on our novel interactions with Fusarium spp. project.

Almost all lab members got together to enjoy lunch at the close of the fall semester and celebrate the first year of the Carter Lab. We toasted to Alison’s B.Sc. graduation and Ruth’s M.Sc. graduation – both are continuing in the lab next semester as M.Sc. and Ph.D. students, respectively. Though Tim couldn’t make it, he was still there in spirit (and photoshop).

The Carter Lab showed up in full force for our first Biological Sciences Research Symposium with 3 students presenting small-format posters focused on the methods for their projects. Bhuwan and Dallas both got perfect scores from their science communication judges!

A new undergraduate researcher has joined the lab – Aylha Pferschy. She is a senior in biological sciences and will be working on basic culturing and phenotyping of a novel bacterial-fungal symbiosis as part of a collaboration with USDA ARS.