News

University of Waterloo Office of Research has announced the competition for the UW Interdisciplinary Trailblazer Fund - Round 5, intended to support early career researchers kickstart their potentially game-changing interdisciplinary research project and better prepare them for external funding opportunities, such as New Frontiers Research Fund (NFRF) Exploration Grants.

Applications are due November 27, 2023. 

Funding from the Trailblazer award may only be used for co-funding jointly supervised graduate student(s) and/or postdoctoral fellow(s) who is/are directly involved in the proposed project. Applicants are expected to have other funding resources available to cover other project expenses by the time the project commences.

For details on the call, including eligibility criteria and detailed application instructions, view the full call.

The Waterloo Centre for Microbial Research (WCMR) is coordinating a campus project screening for COVID using saliva. Professors Trevor Charles and Jozef Nissimov from the Department of Biology, alongside Drs. Patricia Quadros and Carly Huitema of the WCMR have been awarded $120,000 to determine the effectiveness of a new rapid test and help prevent outbreaks on campus.

The WCMR participated in a panel of international experts as part of our membership representing Canada in the international, EU funded project MicrobiomeSupport. The outcome of this workshop and subsequent online survey was to propose a widely accepted definition of 'microbiome', which was just published in the journal Microbiome.

The WCMR has released a video explaining the antibody serum test for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The WCMR event Hack the Plastics, had a successful weekend at the University of Waterloo on Friday, Saturday and Sunday (Feb 28-Mar 1). Photo gallery.

Students from many different disciplines and Universities and Colleges from around Ontario came out to spend the weekend coming up with ways to solve problems related to single-use plastics and incorporating microbes into their solution.

SynBio 4.0; Bringing together the future of biology

May 26-28

by Claire Murphy, Research collaborator    

For this year's World Microbiome day, WatSAM decided to engage the creative side of students on the University of Waterloo campus. A booth was set up with a option to decorate a cookie and design a pinback button with inspiration drawn from various types of petri dishes. The cookies drew in many curious (and hungry) students, and those who had a bit more time sat down and designed a button or grabbed a WatSAM laptop sticker. Students had a blast getting creative while learning and celebrating World Microbiome day.

Come visit the WCMR booth and learn about Microbiome Support at this year's Canadian Society for Microbiology meeting in Sherbrooke Quebec.

Faculty of Science and WCMR members Andrew Doxey and Laura Hug, with University of Waterloo students Kerrin Mendler, Han Chen, and Briallen Lobb have released AnnoTree, a tool that allows the visualization and exploration of a functionally annotated microbial tree of life.

A team of researchers in the WCMR (Graduate students Emilie Spasov and Jackson Tsuji, Waterloo alumna Laura Sauder, and Professors Laura Hug, Andrew Doxey, Wayne Parker, and Josh Neufeld) have published a preprint article on the activities of complete ammonia oxidizing (“comammox”)