Has another year gone by already? It’s been a busy year! Without dwelling too much on the past, I’m excited to report that Dr. Mitch Ramuta successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis. Lauren Raasch and Max Bobholz are both accepted into grad school/med school and are moving on from the lab this summer. The best part of the job of a Professor is watching students and staff thrive.
We’ve been pretty busy on a number of fronts. Our genomics team is trying to develop genomic tools that can be used to stop the illegal smuggling of macaques. Julie and Trent also published the first complete macaque MHC haplotype in more than fifteen years, using cutting-edge sequencing to create the most accurate assembly of this immunologically important to date.
Christina and the Zika virus team recently described a new macaque model for evaluating drugs and vaccines in pregnant macaques.
COVID has also remained at the top of our lab’s research priorities. We are studying enigmatic cryptic lineages of viruses found in wastewater; we think these are derived from people who have been chronically infected for several years. Environmental surveillance isn’t only about wastewater. We’ve continued expanding air sampling for viral genetic material. As the final part of Mitch’s thesis project, he showed that we could sequence all kinds of viruses from these air samples. We also are continuing to investigate how “conventional” SARS-CoV-2 variants evolve in space and time.