6 March 2012, 4 pm
Bristol Microbiology Forum special seminar
Louise Temple (James Madison University, Virginia)
C44, Medical Sciences Building
Dr Temple has been working with undergraduates in microbiology research for 18 years at two universities in the US. Her long-term bacterial pathogenesis work has been investigating many aspects of the bird pathogen, Bordetella avium. Currently, she and her students are constructing an attenuated strain of B. avium to serve as a delivery system for heterologous antigens for other poultry pathogens. Additionally, Dr. Temple has worked for some time on discovery and analysis of bacteriophages, including several of B. avium.
In a recent large scale science educational experiment in the US, Dr. Temple participated in a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Bacteriophage Discovery program for young college students. Thousands of first year university students have found phages from soil that infect Mycobacterium smegmatis and two Bacillus species, and many of these have been characterized to the level of visualization by electron microscopy and genome sequence and annotation. In this presentation she will describe this ongoing work and highlight some outcomes of both the educational and scientific endeavours of this program.
