Catherine Bowman cleans up at the 2014 Bay Area Science and Engineering Fair!

Posted on April 6, 2014 by Dr. Dawn M. E. Bowdish

Catherine Bowman, a grade 10 student from St. Mary’s Catholic Secondary in Hamilton, joined the Bowdish lab under the mentorship of Avee Naidoo (MSc candidate) and Kyle Novakowski (MSc student) recently to work on a project entitled “The Effects of Apigenin, Diosmetin and Chicoric Acid on TNF-Alpha and COX-2 Levels of Stimulated RAW 264.7 Macrophages.”

She received a number of awards including a BASEF gold medal, Cancer Assistance Programme Award – First, Hillfield Strathallan College Awards of Excellence- Biological Sciences Award, Hamilton Association da Vinci Award, Drs. Ranjan Sur and Monalisa Sur Award, Pinnacle Best in Fair and the ArcelorMittal Dofasco Pinnacle best-in-fair award at the Bay Area Science and Engineering Fair for her project. She’ll be presenting her work at Canada-wide and the International Science Fair!

To read the article from the Hamilton Spectator, click here.

Catherine Bowman beside her award winning poster (BASEF, March 2014).

Funding from the province of Ontario supports two new graduate students!

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Dr. Dawn M. E. Bowdish

Bowdish lab receives funding from the province of Ontario to train two new graduate students! Avee Naidoo (MSc) and Dessi Loukov, who will be starting a PhD in Sept 2013, will be studying how age-associated inflammation predisposes older adults to pneumonia.

For full details on the award for Dawn’s proposal “Interplay between inflammation and impaired anti-bacterial immunity in the elderly.”
http://iidr.mcmaster.ca/IIDR-news/ERAs-2014.html#.UzXGj_ldWSo

Dessi Loukov, pictured here pushing back the boundaries of science.

Aveshni Naidoo, MSc sits beside the coolest jack-o’-lantern ever.

Whelan et al. The Loss of Topography in the Microbial Communities of the Upper Respiratory Tract in the Elderly. Ann Am Thorac Soc. 2014 Mar 6.

Posted on March 20, 2014 by Dr. Dawn M. E. Bowdish

Whelan FJ, Verschoor CP, Stearns JC, Rossi L, Luinstra K, Loeb M, Smieja M, Johnstone J, Surette MG, Bowdish DM. The Loss of Topography in the Microbial Communities of the Upper Respiratory Tract in the Elderly. Ann Am Thorac Soc. 2014 Mar 6.

This paper describes how the microbial communities of the anterior nares and nasopharynx change between adults and the elderly.

Dawn Bowdish & Chad Steele elected Vice Chairs for the 2016 Gordon conference on Acute Respiratory Infections!

Posted on March 4, 2014 by Dr. Dawn M. E. Bowdish

I attended the Gordon conference on “Acute Respiratory Infections” in Barga, Italy. It was an exceptional meeting, with lots of great science and surprisingly I was elected with Chad Steele to be vice-chairs of the 2016 conference and chairs of the 2018 conference! I’m really excited to be part of this amazing group of researchers. Look how enthusiastic Chad & I are. 2016 is in Galveston, Texas & one of my goals is to have that place swimming with Canadians. It would be almost impossible to match the quality of this year’s conference but Chad and I will certainly do our best.

Dawn Bowdish & Chad Steele are excited to be elected Vice Chairs of the 2016 Gordon conference on Acute Respiratory Infections and Chairs of the 2018 meeting!

For a photo of all the attendees at the conference – click here -> grcphoto_2014_bioacute

PradhuDas et al. Standardizing Scavenger Receptor Nomenclature. J Immunol. 2014 Mar 1;192(5):1997-2006.

Posted on March 3, 2014 by Dr. Dawn M. E. Bowdish

PrabhuDas M, Bowdish D, Drickamer K, Febbraio M, Herz J, Kobzik L, Krieger M, Loike J, Means TK, Moestrup SK, Post S, Sawamura T, Silverstein S, Wang XY, El Khoury J. Standardizing scavenger receptor nomenclature. J Immunol. 2014 Mar 1;192(5):1997-2006. doi: 10.4049/jimmunol.1490003.

Puchta et al. Characterization of inflammatory responses during intranasal colonization with Streptococcus pneumoniae. Vis Exp. 2014 Jan 17;(83):e50490. doi: 10.3791/50490.

Posted on January 20, 2014 by Dr. Dawn M. E. Bowdish

Puchta A, Verschoor CP, Thurn T, Bowdish DM. Characterization of inflammatory responses during intranasal colonization with Streptococcus pneumoniae. J Vis Exp. 2014 Jan 17;(83):e50490. doi: 10.3791/50490.

Whelan et al. Bioinformatics for Immunologists. Front Immunol. 2013 Dec 4;4:416. eCollection 2013.

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Dr. Dawn M. E. Bowdish

Whelan FJ, Yap NV, Surette MG, Golding GB, Bowdish DM.A Guide to Bioinformatics for Immunologists. Front Immunol. 2013 Dec 4;4:416. eCollection 2013. Click picture for .pdf.

A guide to Bioinformatics for Immunologists

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Dr. Dawn M. E. Bowdish

Congratulations to Fiona Whelan (MSc, Bowdish lab; PhD student, Surette lab) for publishing the review article “A guide to bioinformatics for immunologists” in Frontiers Immunology. The idea of this article spawned from the research that Fiona conducted in the Bowdish lab on the elucidation of the evolutionary history and relationships between the members of the class A scavenger receptors, proteins required for host defense and homeostasis. During this time, Fiona used multiple bioinformatic techniques and tools to form hypotheses as to the function of one under-annotated member of this family, SCARA3. Even though most of these tools are easy-to-use and require little computational knowledge, Fiona and Dawn discovered through their interactions with other immunologists that these tools were being under utilized. Thus, they decided to write a review of how bioinformatic techniques can help the average immunologist in their quest for knowledge about the structure of their protein of interest, how to find SNPs that may correlate with disease phenotype, and how to conduct sequence alignments in order to find areas that are conserved across various genes.

This review article is written as a case study that follows Fiona’s research into SCARA3 that begins with obtaining the NCBI Reference FASTA sequence of the protein, predicting post-translational modifications, identifying conserved motifs, hypothesizing as to the structure of the protein, examining SCARA3’s transcriptomic profile in different immunological cell types, and analyzing any potential SNPs within the DNA sequence of SCARA3 that may correlate with disease. The article is written with the immunologist in mind and includes the use of only “point and click” tools that require no computational background whatsoever.

Is Fiona’s paper is Open Access? Of course it is! Enjoy reading it here and reading the description on the Surette lab website here.

The laboratories of both Dr. Bowdish and Dr. Surette are always interested in undergraduate and graduate students interested in exploring the impact bioinformatics can have on immunological and microbiological research.

Dawn featured in the “After Office Hours” series of student produced videos.

Posted on November 27, 2013 by Dr. Dawn M. E. Bowdish

Do professors seem distant & unapproachable to you? They shouldn’t be, after all they were once students themselves. A group of McMaster students created the “After Office Hours” series to profile a number of McMaster professors, including Dawn. They asked all sorts of great questions like “what do you do for fun?”, “what advice would you give yourself as an undergrad?”, “what’s the weirdest thing an undergraduate student has said to you?”.

To see Dawn’s interview, click here.

Dawn’s Google+ social media page listed as one of “99 Google Plus Pages Every PhD Candidate Should Follow”.