Narine Arabyan finished her PhD in the Weimer Micro Lab in October 2017! She will be moving to a fantastic position as a Post-doctoral NIH Fellowship – National Biosafety and Biocontainment Training Program (NBBTP) Fellow in January 2018. Narine’s dissertation was titled, “Glycan degradation, carbon starvation, and metabolism during Salmonella infection and non-culturability”. I wanted to highlight a specific achievement during her time in my lab, even though she was extremely helpful in the 100K Pathogen Genome Project, her manuscripts detailing the how Salmonella digests the host glycan to gain access to the host membrane is the most important. She published a series of experiments describing the specific glycosylhydrolases of Salmonella degrade the complex glycocalyx on epithelial cells that resulted in: 1) host glycan gene expression changes, 2) the transition to a fucose dominated glycan, and 3) how Salmonella requires a specific set of enzymes to gain access to the membrane for the T3SS to touch the host membrane. Congratulations, Narine. I’m anxiously waiting to see how you will flourish as a scientist!!
