Violka and Silvie, together with our colleagues from České Budějovice, optimized the protocol for isolating mycobacteria from the environment. Over the summer they managed to dig quite a lot of mycobacteria out of the soil – and the protocol works beautifully!
In April, we organized a field trip to a clinical microbiology lab for the students of Fyziologie bakterií II. We got a full tour of the lab, talked about all the safety rules they have to follow, and walked through the entire process — from receiving samples to entering results into the system. We even […]
Eliška Mikesková, Lucie Zahradníčková and Adam Hoško defended their Bachelor thesis in June 2025. Congratulations to all of them on achieving the highest grade! The theses are available online here: Eliška, Lucka and Adam.
In the spring of 2025, we visited an elementary school in Prague, where we prepared a fun session about bacteria for 3rd to 5th grade students. The kids were amazing and enjoyed it. We investigated where in the classroom the most bacteria might be hiding, what was the dirtiest, and what was surprisingly clean. We […]
Mahmoud defended his PhD thesis with cum laude honors in September 2024. His second first-author manuscript is currently under review and can be found on bioRxiv. Mahmoud also created a new logo for us – big thanks! Jeevitha is our new PhD student who joined the lab in November. In addition, two new Bachelor students, […]
This week, we performed our first sequencing of nontuberculous mycobacteria patient samples using Oxford Nanopore. You can guess what it was 🙂 The yellow samples are from a rare species that recently infected two patients in the Czech Republic. Thanks to the National Reference Laboratory for Mycobacteria for providing the isolates! We also thank our […]
Our PhD student Silvia went to the Netherlands in July to learn how to cultivate anaerobic bacteria. Thanks to the organizers for a great course!
In January 2023, we were given the opportunity to move to a laboratory at Vinicna 5 and establish our own group. The laboratory was indeed beautiful, but the only problem was that it had absolutely nothing in it besides furniture. We thought we’d hit the jackpot when we applied for the university grant, PRIMUS, which […]