Academic year:

• Wade Hicks received a Richter grant to travel to UCLA and follow up his pH survival studies by measuring isoaspartyl accumulation. He presented his work at the national meeting of the American Society for Microbiology and published his work in Microbiology in 2005.

Summer:

• Matt Kotlajich extended Wade's work and showed that survival of pcm mutants under oxidative stress is also pH-dependent.
• Lyndsey Crampton worked with Matt in measuring long-term stress survival at high pH and also did preliminary studies of survival in minimal medium at high pH.
• Toni Thomas began a collaborative project with D. A. Stuart, a local chemical company, to find rapid ways of detecting mycobacteria associated with hypersensitivity pneumonitis in metalworking fluids.

Academic year:

• Taryn Hall tested the ability of pcm mutants to compete with wild-type cells as an Ecology project. Her preliminary data suggests that subtly impaired survival of repair-deficient cells make them poor competitors.

Summer:

• Wade Hicks showed that impaired survival of pcm mutants requires three factors: aging (long-term starvation), stress (e.g., methanol or oxidation) and high pH (produced over time in rich but not minimal medium).