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.

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 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!