Prof. Nair attends ACS BIOT spring meeting in New Orleans, LA. (Mar 18 – 22)
Met current and former Zhao lab members, as always, for lunch. Small group this time – with Zengyi Shao (Iowa State), Huimin Zhao (UIUC), Ryan Cobb (Dow Agrosciences), and Behnam Enghiad (grad student in the Zhao lab).

Venkatesh’s paper is accepted for publication in Nature Communications!
Congrats, Venkatesh! Look for the article “A Semi-synthetic Regulon Enables Rapid Growth of Yeast on Xylose” here.

Press release associated with this publication: Tufts Now!, Biofuels International, EurekAlert!, NewsWise, and MediaNet.

Also thanks to Faculty Research Awards: Open Access Publishing and Graduate Open Access Funding for paying the exorbitant publisher fees!

Zac’s review article is accepted for publication in Current Opinion in Biotechnology!
Congratulations, Zac! Here is the link to, “Synthetic Biology in Probiotic Lactic Acid Bacteria: At the Frontier of Living Therapeutics”.

Joe’s review article is accepted for publication in Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering!
Yay, Joe! The article was written with Chase Beisel (formerly of NCSU) and is titled, “Synthetic Biology Approaches to Engineer Probiotics and Members of the Human Microbiota for Biomedical Applications”. Here’s the link.

Kelsey leaves the group. 🙁
Undergrad Kelsey decides to leave the lab to focus on her entrepreneurial work. Good luck with everything!

New group photo up!
After several tries, we managed to get everyone in one photo!