🎉 Our inaugural Micro Retreat was truly unforgettable! Two days filled with enlightening scientific dialogues, bonding, and joy with our amazing community. Overwhelmed with gratitude for the memories we've created together. Dive into the highlights with our video recap! 🎥

Tomorrow's COM research-in-progress forum will be Nazik Elmekki from the Comstock lab talking about protection and fitness of gut Bacteroidales during stress.

This Wednesday, COM will host Dr. Alan R. Hauser from Northwestern University, who will talk about understanding bacterial pathogen carriage in the gastrointestinal tract

1/ New preprint! We discovered that Bacteroidales in the gut microbiome can metabolize exogenous DNA 🧬 —turning genetic material into usable nutrients. “DNA-utilization loci enable exogenous DNA metabolism in gut Bacteroidales” 👉

Tomorrow's COM seminar will be UChicago's own Jueqi Chen talking about organelle remodeling during bacterial and viral infections.

And that's a wrap on this year's Howard T. Ricketts Annual Symposium and Microbiology Retreat, with student talks, posters, trivia, a disco ball and two keynote speakers: Laurie Comstock and Jeff Gordon.

This Friday's COM research-in-progress will be given by Shafi Azam in the Missiakas lab, talking about coordination of septal peptidoglycan synthesis and protein anchoring in Staphylococcus aureus.

This Wednesday, COM will host Dr. Kamal Khanna from NYU Langone Health, speaking on the critical roles of nerve and airway associated interstitial macrophages in respiratory immunity.

Come to the South Side Science Festival on the UChicago campus tomorrow (Saturday Oct 4th) for fun and interactive science demos. Suitable for all ages!

Tomorrow, Baylee Heiden from the Khader/Tay lab will give a research in progress talk on characterizing early Mycobacterial interactions with airway cells.

The last COM research in progress talk will be tomorrow by Ellen Ketter in the Barriero lab talking about human epigenetic determinants of BCG-induced trained immunity.

This Friday's COM research forum will be Maddie Sheahan from the Comstock lab talking about "Properties of Nanaerobic Growth in Bacteroides" and Tonu Pius from the Missiakas lab discussing "Old Memory, New Tricks: Redirecting Staph Immunity."

Today's COM reasearch forum will be by Tess Bruner and Zoe Kellermyer talking about the clinical impact of Pseudomonas aeruginosa gastrointestinal colonization and the role of Lon-dependent proteolysis in Acinetobacter baumanii dessication resistance, respectively.

Tomorrow's COM seminar is Dr. Stephen Trent from the University of Georgia Foundation talking about pushing the envelope: building and maintaining the Gram-negative cell surface.

Tomorrow's COM research forum will be Yunys Perez-Betancourt in the Missiakas lab talking about decoding persistent nasopharyngeal colonization by Staphylococcus aureus.

Tomorrow's COM work in progress will be Izzy Izquierdo from the Randall lab talking about mechanisms of proviral lipophagy in dengue virus egress.

Tomorrow's COM seminar will be Dr. Sarah Fortune from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health talking about evolving Mycobacterium tuberculosis: how drug pressure is reshaping essential and virulence processes.

Today's COM seminar is by Helen Beilinson in the Golovkina lab talking about resistance of YBR/Ei mice to viral and bacterial pathogens.

Today's COM research talk is Leila Tuzlak in the Comstock lab, talking about the genetic architecture of a Bacteroides T6SS encoded on an ICE.

This week's COM invited seminar speaker is Dr. Karen Ottermann from the University of California-Santa Cruz, talking about flagellar motors that incorporate parts of type 4 pili to fine tune bacterial motiliy responses.

Tomorrow COM will have two WIP talks from the Randall lab: Peter Wang talking about mechanisms of interferon-mediated inhibition reveal host–virus Interactions in murine Norovirus; and Isabel Izquierdo on elucidating mechanisms of proviral lipophagy in dengue virus egress.