The researchers who first reported the Omicron variant have published their findings about the discovery of Omicron a few days. I will explain how they discovered Omicron by summarizing some of the findings from their publication1. A recap of Omicron Almost two months, I published a blog post about the first reports of Omicron from South Africa. Before Omicron emerged, South Africa had already experienced three waves of SARS-Cov-2, each driven by different lineages over…

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The researchers who first reported the Omicron variant have published their findings about the discovery of Omicron a few days ago. I will explain how they discovered Omicron by summarizing some of the findings from their publication1. A recap of Omicron Almost two months ago, I published a blog post about the first reports of Omicron from South Africa. Before Omicron emerged, South Africa had already experienced three waves of SARS-Cov-2, each driven by different…

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Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all! I hope that you are all managing well with the Omicron variant and that you still have been able to spend time with your loved ones this Christmas. On a personal note, I got my Pfizer booster shot today and I’m currently typing up this blog post as I begin to feel the side effect of fatigue. However, feeling tired won’t stop me from typing…

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Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all! I hope that you are all managing well with the Omicron variant and that you still have been able to spend time with your loved ones this Christmas. On a personal note, I got my Pfizer booster shot today and I’m currently typing up this blog post as I begin to feel the side effect of fatigue. However, feeling tired won’t stop me from typing…

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While the article featured today is behind a paywall, here is the link to the paper anyway. During my PhD, our department holds weekly seminars for graduate students to share their work with their peers and professors. Many of the graduate students within our department are associated with the Institute of Infectious Disease Research (IIDR) at McMaster University. Some of the IIDR labs focus on characterizing bacteria like P. aeruginosa. However, most of them are…

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While the article featured today is behind a paywall, here is the link to the paper anyway. During my PhD, our department holds weekly seminars for graduate students to share their work with their peers and professors. Many of the graduate students within our department are associated with the Institute of Infectious Disease Research (IIDR) at McMaster University. Some of the IIDR labs focus on characterizing bacteria like P. aeruginosa. However, most of them are…

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In Canada, we have been very fortunate to see a high vaccination rate and a relatively slow increase in SARS-Cov-2 cases compared with other countries. As a case in point, Ontario is seeing 927 new cases today amid a continued gradual reopening process 1. Conversely, countries across Europe like Austria, Slovakia, Netherlands, and Belgium have reinstated lockdown procedures as case counts continue to increase2, 3. While this blog post will not go into the reasons…

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The link to the paper I’m writing about for my first Cystic Fibrosis (CF) Canada blog post can be found here1. As I mentioned in my blog update, I’m now a blogger for CF Canada. My task at CF Canada is to write about the latest CF research being done by Canadians. I saw helping out at CF Canada as a great opportunity for me to connect more closely with the CF patient community and…

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The link to the paper I’m writing about for my first Cystic Fibrosis (CF) Canada blog post can be found here1. As I mentioned in my blog update, I’m now a blogger for CF Canada. My task at CF Canada is to write about the latest CF research being done by Canadians. I saw helping out at CF Canada as a great opportunity for me to connect more closely with the CF patient community and…

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It’s been a quite a while since I made a blog post for Microbe Musings. Almost two months in fact. A lot has happened since my last blog post, all of which I’ll get to here! A lot of my time was spent working towards defending my PhD thesis this summer. I’ve been working from home trying to characterize what are called “hypothetical proteins”. These are proteins that computer programs predict to exist with an…

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