Lab News
News and Updates from the Fauver Lab
March, 2024- NIH R01 Funded!
Our collaborative grant titled "Genomic approaches to define hookworm population diversity and deworming drug response" was recently funded by NIAID. This funding provides dedicated support to our lab, Mike Cappello at the Yale School of Public Health, and Mike Wilson at the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research in Ghana to apply genomic approaches to better understand the transmission dynamics and epidemiology of hookworm infection in Ghana. We are thrilled to be a part of this exciting collaboration!
November, 2023- Pathogen Genomics in Chad
Joseph travelled to N'Djamena, Chad to conduct a pathogen genomics workshop for local researchers as part of a collaboration with Amy Bei at the Yale School of Public Health. Nearly 30 participants took part in the workshop and ultimately the team was successful in generating, sequencing, and analyzing NGS data from both Dengue virus and Plasmodium falciparum. Read a write up from folks at YSPH here.
November, 2023- Kaylee wins ASTMH Young Investigator Award
November, 2023- Juliana and Taylor present their work at UNMC COPH Research Conference
Juliana presented her poster on the knowledge, attitudes, and perceptions of tick-borne diseases from agricultural workers, veterinarians, and health care professionals in the Plains states. Taylor gave a talk about hookworm epidemiology in Ghana as a part of her Chambers Fellowship this summer. Congrats Juliana and Taylor!
October, 2023- New paper out in Nature Microbiology
Our paper entitled “Viral kinetics of sequential SARS-CoV-2 infections” was published in Nature Communications. This is another manuscript as a part of our exciting collaboration with the NBA and folks at YSPH, Harvard, and IQVIA.
October, 2023- First pre-print from the Fauver Lab is available via BioxRxiv
The first pre-print is out! This manuscript is the result of our labs work on using the Oxford Nanopore MinION platform to generate high-quality de novo assemblies from parasitic nematodes. These methods were crucial to develop for our genomic epidemiological work trying to understand transmission dynamics of parasitic nematodes in endemic areas. Here, we showed that we can get highly contiguous, accurate, and complete genomes using just ONT MinION data. This paper is currently under review. Pre-print here.
August, 2023- Ava and Dikchha present their work from the summer
Ava and Dikchha did an awesome job presenting their posters at the annual SURP student poster presentation. Ava spent her summer optimizing and validating microsatellite markers in the Schistosoma haematobium genome and developing NGS based approaches for sequencing these markers. Dikchha spent her summer generating dozens of West Nile virus genomes and comparing multiple amplicon-based approaches. We were fortunate to have such incredible students in the lab for the summer!
July, 2023- Taylor spends time with collaborators in Ghana as part of her Chambers Fellowship
Taylor Clarkson, an MPH student conducting her capstone work in the Fauver Lab, was awarded the prestigious Chambers Fellowship from UNMC to spend her summer in Ghana working as a part of our collaborative network with the Yale School of Public Health and Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research. Taylor first stopped in New Haven, CT to learn field epidemiological techniques in Michael Cappello’s lab at YSPH. She then spent ~1 month with the field team in Ghana engaging study participants, prepping samples for Kato-Katz diagnostics, and collecting data. This work is a part of our Translational Studies of Hookworm Infection in Ghana R01 supported by the NIH.
July, 2023- MinION training at ASP
Kaylee and Joseph gave a workshop on practical MinION sequencing at the American Society for Parasitologists in Kansas City. Prior to the conference, ~30 researchers participated in the workshop that covered an overview of the technology, considerations for library preparation, QC, loading flow cells and interpreting run level data. They were able to successfully generate whole-genome sequence data from an individual Aspidogaster worm.
June, 2023- Summer Students
Ava Butz, Dikchha Gurung, Sarah Uhm, and Rachel Wu join us for the summer! Ava, and undergraduate at Cornell, and Dikchha, an undergraduate at UNO, are SURP students. Sarah is a rotating MD/PhD student at UNMC, and Rachel is a high school intern. We are thrilled to have the in the lab!
April, 2023- New Paper out in PNAS
This work, led my Chantal Vogels at YSPH, presents the first genomic epidemiological study of Powassan virus in the US. Check it out here.
April, 2023- New Paper out in Genome Biology and Evolution
This study aimed to characterize the phylogeogric spread and under reporting of the Mu SARS-Cov-2 variant. Check it out here.
