Priming In A Permissive Type I-C CRISPR-Cas System Reveals Distinct Dynamics Of Spacer Acquisition And Loss | bioRxiv →

Our first bioRxiv preprint. Congrats Chitong.

Yesterday the lab graduated its first PhD student, the newly-minted Dr. Chitong Rao! Chitong did a great job in his public talk and private defense. Chitong is off to Boston for a postdoc later in summer - so we got him some garb to blend in. As is tradition for the lab, he also received a Legionnaires comic book - it is indeed and end of an era in the lab.

Special thanks go out to Andrew Lang for flying in to serve as Chitong’s external examiner - we all had fun learning about the Lang and Beatty labs’ work on gene-transfer agents in bacteria.

Diverse mechanisms of metaeffector activity in an intracellular bacterial pathogen, Legionella pneumophila | Molecular Systems Biology →

In December we published the first results from an awesome collaborative project with the Savchenko and Taipale laboratories. Using high-throughput screening (in yeast) and structure-function studies, Malene, Andy, and colleagues identified several members of an exciting class of bacterial effectors with novel regulatory activities - metaeffectors!

Long overdue update from the Ensminger lab! It’s been a busy last year. First, we moved into a brand new building, the 16th floor of the MaRS West tower. Being surrounded by other infectious disease labs in the departments of Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry, all located on the same floor, has been a game changer in our day-to-day scientific lives. 

… the views aren’t half-bad either.

Active and adaptive Legionella CRISPR-Cas reveals a recurrent challenge to the pathogen - Rao - 2016 - Cellular Microbiology - Wiley Online Library →

Congratulations to Chitong Rao and all of our collaborators on this awesome story. We have dedicated this manuscript to the memory of Patrick Tang and Donald Low from Public Health Ontario; without whose support and lifetime dedication to public health, these analyses would not have been possible. 

In it, we present:
• a fully circularized, finished genome of the strain responsible for the 2005 outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in Toronto.
• evidence that Legionella pneumophila CRISPR-Cas plays a canonical role in genome defense.
• the first known target of L. pneumophila CRISPR-Cas: a 30 kb episomal element that shifts L. pneumophila host range.

We’ve been at the University of Toronto for 5 years! (awesome card by Amanda Charlesworth - a first-year graduate student in the Claycomb lab).

Legionella pneumophila, armed to the hilt: justifying the largest arsenal of effectors in the bacterial world →

A recent review, where we provide several possible explanations for why Legionella pneumophila has many more effectors than other bacterial pathogens.

FASEB “Molecular Pathogenesis: Mechanisms of Infectious Disease” meeting, July 2015. Rafting trip!

Joseph Burley (left, McGill Undergrad, summer research student) and Chitong Rao (right, PhD student) at the MoGen undergrad poster session. Joseph presented his work on the molecular characterization of an enigmatic mobile element in Legionella. Great job Joseph and thanks for all of your hard work this summer. You will be missed!

Genome Alberta | Genomics Blog | CRISPR brings a multi-purpose tool into the genetics toolbox - Part I →

A podcast with Alex that explains CRISPR-Cas gene editing to a lay audience, with a particular focus on how genomics and research aimed at unlocking the secrets of some enigmatic DNA sequences helped get us to this point.