Heath Lab News

Allison develops an activity on biofilms and density as part of FULL STEAM AHEAD at the new Martens Center in Champaign!

Check out our new mBio paper on the complex and context-dependent genetics of symbiotic extended phenotypes!

https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/mbio.01823-22

Check out the fantastic community engagement program Cena y Ciencias (thanks to SACNAS, Ivan, and many others)

David and Ivan entertaining the children. Enjoy the buffet – they’ll be here all week!

jump!
pin the organism on the habitat

WOOT! Karla did an amazing job today presenting her masters work on the phenotypic effects of soybean endophytes!

Tell it!
And now, we celebrate!

The multi-talented Crissy Gallick has left the building (sniff) to pursue a new position at the EPA in Kansas City. Go Crissy! We will miss you!

Crissy visiting the soybeans

We have pizza and celebrate Crissy on Halloween.
And yes, Ivan is dressed as a burrito.

Former MS student Alex Riley’s paper on population genetic structure in rhizobium divided genomes is out in Molecular Ecology. Woohoo!

Discordant population structure between the chromosome and pSymA in Sinorhizobium meliloti

Karla winging it.
Jada (above) and Karla (below) painting it on!

The best part about the Heath lab is how everyone pitches in when harvest is a bitch. From left: Patrick, Izzy, Crissy, Sierra, Yoel, Ivan.

Check out a new collaborative paper with Jen Lau and Wendy Yang (and many others!) on the ecosystem-level impacts of rhizobium evolution, which just came out in Oecologia.

https://www.pnas.org/post/journal-club/cheating-may-rare-symbiotic-relationships