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Thanks to the student exchange program between their Erasmus University (EhB, Brussels, Belgium) and Bellevue University, two new students are currently working at Bellevue University as Science Lab Assistants. For the past three years students visiting from EhB have had the opportunity to gained practical experience aligned with their Erasmus studies in the area of biomedical lab technology. This year the lab is joined by Alyssia Lespes and Solenn Bosmans, who are… Read More
Summer is almost over, but do you ever wonder what microbes are possibly in your swimming pool? You may not know that some species can easily survive chlorine and can be abundant in public pools and water supplies. Our newest publication is a collaborative research paper that found a new species of non-tuberculosis Mycobacterium in a public swimming pool in Omaha, Nebraska. Although these species do not cause tuberculosis, they can cause… Read More
Native plants don’t get nearly enough research attention and the representation of genome information for native plants is substantially lower than the database information available for crop plants or popular ornamental plants. The new student-led research at Bellevue University is trying to change some of that paradigm, and students from our research classes, visiting student programs and student worker positions have been sequencing a variety of plants from our native plant garden… Read More
Dr. John Kyndt, Professor of Microbiology and Sustainability is one of this year’s recipients of the Nebraska EPSCoR grants for Undergraduate Research Experience in Small Colleges and Universities. His proposal entitled: ‘Nebraska Salt Marsh Microbiome: an exploration of spatial and temporal microbial diversity’, will allow BU students to delve deeper into the largely unexplored world of microbes in these distinctive environments. The Nebraska Salt Marsh areas are a relic of ancient oceans… Read More
This week our senior science student Kaziah Terrell is in the spotlight. Kaziah is graduating this Spring with her Biology bachelor’s degree with a minor in Chemistry! Kaziah is originally from Atlanta and joined Bellevue University four years ago to study Biology and play for the BU Bruins basketball team. She is currently completing her senior thesis with research on the resilience and diversity of the human skin microbiome. Not often do… Read More
Chances are you’ve heard that native plant gardens help the environment because they require less watering and provide habitats for pollinator insects like bees and butterflies. But thanks to a Bellevue University natural sciences research team composed of faculty and students, we now know there’s another reason – native plant gardens support more microbial diversity and beneficial bacteria in the soil in which they’re planted. In a paper recently published in the scientific… Read More
Reducing waste and upscaling waste products is one of the key components of sustainable development. As part of the BU sustainability lab, we are constantly exploring new ways or testing new technologies to make our labs and campus more sustainable and energy efficient. One component of the outdoor sustainability lab is a 40-gallon biodiesel reactor that was purchased to produce biodiesel from a variety of oil sources. “The lab has done small-scale… Read More
Fabiola Aviles, one of our former Biology majors, is the lead author on an article describing the discovery of a new bacterial species. The species was isolated from the San Elijo Lagoon near San Diego, where I took some samples while attending a science conference in 2019. After returning back to the lab, one of the samples gave bright yellow colonies on the plates. Fabiola extracted its DNA and sequenced the genome… Read More
You may not realize that, over 100 million years ago, Nebraska was covered by a large sea. This covered an estimated 20,000 acres, but now all that is left is salt marshes that are widespread around the state. These salt marshes are part of a rare wetland type that occurs in the Sandhills, the North Platte Valley and the valley of the Salt Creek and Little Salt creek. These saline wetlands are… Read More
It is not every day that an entire bacterial genus is discovered and reclassified. We are lucky when occasionally we find a new species, but that alone certainly does not redefine an entire genus. It took the sequencing and comparative analysis of eight new genomes, in addition to the three known genomes of heliobacteria, to come to this discovery. The family of heliobacteria are a small group of phototropic bacteria that were… Read More
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