SBBS Community Showcase - Featured Researchers

My name is Lisa Lombardi, and I am a Research Scientist in the UCD School of Biomolecular and Biomedical Science. In the Butler Lab ((opens in a new window)https://butler.ucd.ie/Butler/) I work with pathogenic fungi, with a particular focus on Candida species. Fungal infections kill more than 1.5 million people every year worldwide. Compared to the antibiotics available for treating bacterial infections our antifungal arsenal is much more limited. Expanding our knowledge of the biology and virulence of these pathogens heavily relies on our ability to manipulate their genomes. To streamline this process, we developed a plasmid-based CRISPR-Cas9 system for gene editing of clinically relevant Candida species, including Candida parapsilosis, which frequently causes infections in infants. We used this CRISPR-Cas9 strategy to successfully edit/delete genes, introduce heterozygous mutations, and dissect the contribution of single nucleotide polymorphisms to antifungal resistance or sensitivity to cell wall stressors in Candida parapsilosis, the two sibling species C. ortho/metapsilosis, and C. tropicalis. Recently, we generated a large library of C. parapsilosis mutant strains that we are currently using to investigate the regulators controlling stress response and metabolism in this species. 

My name is Liam Reynolds and I am a microbiologist and postdoctoral researcher in the UCD School of Biomolecular and Biomedical Science working on the Acclimatize project ((opens in a new window)https://www.acclimatize.eu/). As Dublin Bay is a UNESCO Biosphere and has many bathing waters enjoyed by locals and tourists, understanding how faecal pollution is occurring is important if we are to keep our waters clean. The lessons learned from our research in Dublin Bay can also inform how pollution occurs and can be managed in other locations nationally and internationally. Our work has demonstrated that very small urban streams that are highly polluted can have a big impact on the bathing waters they discharge into and that birdlife and dogs can sporadically contribute to faecal pollution also.

More recently I have started monitoring sewage for SARS-CoV-2. As SARS-CoV-2 RNA can be shed in faeces of symptomatic and asymptomatic infected individuals, the monitoring of sewage for SARS-CoV-2 can give an insight into how the virus is spreading in a community. This wastewater surveillance can also be used to identify the dominant variants that are circulating.