Amy Xiao (ALM LAB)

Wastewater Surveillance to Monitor the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has become a dire public health crisis, with global case counts continuing to rise. Current containment strategies rely on clinical case counts, but these are limited by testing capacity. Wastewater surveillance is an orthogonal method to monitor disease prevalence that is unbiased by such constraints. Here we report public health insights gleaned from longitudinal sampling of Boston-area wastewater during the first wave of the pandemic and offer perspectives on adapting our methods for building-level surveillance.

Joseph Kreitz (ZHANG LAB)

Protein Delivery with a Bacterial Contractile Injection System

The ability to deliver therapeutic proteins to target cells would substantially advance the treatment of a wide array of diseases. To address this gap, we propose to harness a family of naturally-occurring protein delivery systems known as contractile injection systems (CISs). CISs are syringe-like macromolecular complexes that bind to target cells and inject cargo by forcefully driving a spike through the cellular membrane. In this talk, I discuss recent efforts to produce CISs in the laboratory and to deliver proteins to eukaryotic cells.