Today is the first day of our new PhD student Jinyi Su. Jinyi will be working on signaling of intestinal transmembrane mucins as part of the ERC starting grant project. Welcome to the Infection Biology lab, Jinyi!

Defensive Properties of Mucin Glycoproteins during Respiratory Infections-Relevance for SARS-CoV-2 Chatterjee M, van Putten JPM, Strijbis K. mBio. 2020 Nov 12;11(6):e02374-20. doi: 10.1128/mBio.02374-20. Mucus plays a pivotal role in protecting the respiratory tract against microbial infections. It acts as a primary contact site to entrap microbes and facilitates their removal from the respiratory tract via the

PhD student Xinyue Li was awarded a KNVM/NVMM Kiem Award for her paper “MUC1 is a receptor for the Salmonella SiiE adhesin that enables apical invasion into enterocytes”. Congratulations on this prestigious award, Xinyue! The KNVM/NVMM science committee makes the Kiem Awards (EUR 500) available for the best first publications written by young microbiologists, whom are society members and

For the ERC starting grant project, we are looking for a new PhD student to add to our growing team. We are especially interested in candidates with a background in cell biology in combination with microbiology/immunology. Are you interested or do you know somebody who might be? Please have a look at this link: https://www.uu.nl/en/organisation/working-at-utrecht-university/jobs/phd-candidate-intestinal-response-to-bacterial-pathogens-10-fte

The Unique Phospholipidome of the Enteric Pathogen Campylobacter jejuni: Lysophosholipids Are Required for Motility at Low Oxygen Availability. Cao X, Brouwers JFHM, van Dijk L, van de Lest CHA, Parker CT, Huynh S, van Putten JPM, Kelly DJ, Wösten MMSM. J Mol Biol. 2020 Sep 4;432(19):5244-5258. doi: 10.1016/j.jmb.2020.07.012. Epub 2020 Jul 22. In response to

Bacteroides fragilis fucosidases facilitate growth and invasion of Campylobacter jejuni in the presence of mucins. Luijkx YMCA, Bleumink NMC, Jiang J, Overkleeft HS, Wösten MMSM,Strijbis K, Wennekes T. Cell Microbiol. 2020 Aug 22:e13252. doi: 10.1111/cmi.13252. Online ahead of print. PMID: 32827216 The enteropathogenic bacterium, Campylobacter jejuni, was considered to be non-saccharolytic, but recently it emerged that

After ten weeks of lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Androclus building of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine is reopened for research. We are happy to be back in the lab and restart our projects!

On April 1st, we launched our new OneHealth explant facility. If you are interested in performing mucosal infection experiments in intestine or lung explant tissues of different animals, please contact Maitrayee Chatterjee (m.chatterjee@uu.nl).

Due to the corona outbreak we have to close the lab. We will be working from home as best we can. Coffee breaks and Journal club will continue online. Please stay safe and we hope to be back at the bench as soon as possible.

Vaginal dysbiosis associated-bacteria Megasphaera elsdenii and Prevotella timonensis induce immune activation via dendritic cells. J Reprod Immunol. 2020 Apr;138:103085. By van Teijlingen NH, Helgers LC, Zijlstra-Willems EM, van Hamme JL, Ribeiro CMS, Strijbis K, Geijtenbeek TBH Dysbiosis of the vaginal microbiome as a result of overgrowth of anaerobic bacteria leads to bacterial vaginosis (BV) which is associated with increased inflammation in the