Happy Spring from the Rollins-Smith Lab! We’ve had a busy last several months and there is much to catch up on since the last time we posted an update.
First, we’d like to welcome our new research assistant, Chelsea Roach! Chelsea comes to us from Michigan, and she joined the Rollins-Smith Lab in November of 2023. She has brought along her amazing lab skills and is already making great progress on our project looking at the role of macrophages in amphibian immunity against Bd. This is a collaborative project with Leon Grayfer, PhD, of The George Washington University and was overseen by our previous RA, Mitch Le Sage. Since his departure back in the summer of 2023, we looked for someone to take the reins and are delighted that Chelsea is the one to do that. This work involves some new-to-our-lab techniques, and her troubleshooting and tenacity is yielding some great data which we hope to pull together soon in order to better understand how macrophages help amphibians in their fight against Bd infection and chytridiomycosis.
This past March, we had a colleague take some time during her sabbatical to visit our lab. Barb Katzenback, PhD, from the University of Waterloo spent about three weeks in our lab where she both taught us some amazing techniques and learned some of our methodology. We’ve collaborated with her lab in the past looking at the means by which Bd is able to inhibit amphibian immune function. Dr Katzenback and her group are doing some incredibly interesting research; I encourage you to visit her lab website for more information!
We’ve also spent this spring semester working with undergraduate students to fulfill the CUREs (Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences) and Outreach obligations outlined in our RIBBiTR (Resilience Institute Bridging Biological Training and Research) project. We mentored three undergraduate students who worked on a project examining symbiotic bacteria derived from frog skin. These students looked for the presence of putative AMPs (antimicrobial peptides) secreted by the bacterial species that may inhibit the in vitro growth of Bd. These studies are still in their preliminary stages, but we made some progress this past spring with the help of these students. We plan to continue this project over the summer when a high school student from Vanderbilt’s Aspirnaut program joins our lab.
Speaking of the summer, we’ll definitely have a full house! Not only will our Aspirnaut intern, Ruby Isenhart join us, but we’ll have four other undergraduate students. Two of these students: Ria Mirchandani and Vincent Ni have been working in our lab for about a year, and they have well established projects they will continue to pursue. Ria is looking at immune inhibitory factors present in the cell wall of Bd, and Vincent is testing the ability of bullfrog and green frog AMPs to inhibit new isolates of the chytrid fungus. In addition, Nahum Endale and Kate Jaffee will be joining the lab; Kate comes to us from Coby College, and Nahum is a Vanderbilt University student. We are excited to welcome both of them to do additional work looking at AMPs inhibition of Bd and help with the macrophage project.
Lastly, take a few minutes and check out this youtube video that showcases some of the recent work we’ve been doing in Panama as part of our RIBBiTR project!
