{"id":16520,"date":"2017-01-01T10:30:29","date_gmt":"2017-01-01T15:30:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/?p=16520"},"modified":"2017-01-01T10:30:29","modified_gmt":"2017-01-01T15:30:29","slug":"bacteria-strain-named-by-clemson-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/bacteria-strain-named-by-clemson-students\/","title":{"rendered":"Bacteria strain named by Clemson students"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Clemson University microbiology major Hayley Hassler, a junior from Hartsville, S.C., works with a petri dish containing Legionella clemsonensis<\/em>, a strand of bacteria named after the University.<\/p><\/div>
\nThe Clemson family has gained a new namesake: Legionella clemsonensis<\/em>, a novel strain of the Legionella <\/em>bacteria, the most common cause of waterborne bacterial outbreaks in the United States.
\nThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) gave the honor of naming L. clemsonensis<\/em> to students in a collaborative research group called CU and the CDC, which includes students from Clemson\u2019s\u00a0Creative Inquiry\u00a0(CI) program for undergraduate students and officials in the CDC Legionella<\/em> lab.
\nThe newly named strain of Legionella<\/em> was part of a batch of 68 strains the CDC sent to Clemson students to analyze. \u201cWhile we knew they were Legionella<\/em>, they didn\u2019t match up to anything in the current database of bacterial species. It\u2019s like knowing their last name but not their first names,\u201d said\u00a0Tamara McNealy, an associate professor of biological sciences who forged the collaboration with Claressa Lucas, director of the CDC Legionella<\/em> lab, to characterize unknown Legionella<\/em> strains.
\nUndergraduates in the CI group \u2014 Joseph Painter, Kyle Toth, Kasey Remillard, Rayphael Hardy and Scott Howard \u2014 sequenced two genes at the\u00a0Clemson University Genomics\u00a0Institute\u00a0to identify the species or to find out if they were novel. \u201cOne of the strains Joseph was assigned turned out to be novel or not significantly matching anything in the database,\u201d McNealy said.
\nA second wave of students, including Hayley Hassler, a junior, and Allie Palmer, a master\u2019s student in McNealy\u2019s lab, along with Vince Richards, an assistant professor in the\u00a0biological sciences department, worked to validate that L. clemsonensis<\/em> does indeed fall separately from the other known Legionella<\/em> strains.
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A sample of the Legionella clemsonensis<\/em> bacteria under a ultraviolet light. The bacteria can be seen as small glowing dots in the 12-o-clock area of the petri dish.<\/p><\/div>
\n[pullquote]\u201cMy experience in this CI has really allowed me to explore areas of microbiology that I wouldn\u2019t have been exposed to otherwise,\u201d Hassler said. \u201cThanks to Dr. McNealy and Dr. Richards I now have a real passion for studying infectious diseases and microbial genomics.\u201d[\/pullquote]
\nAccording to the CDC, L. clemsonensis<\/em> was originally isolated from a patient in Ohio. Preliminary analysis showed it was not L. pneumophila<\/em>, the most commonly identified pathogen in the group, and that it didn\u2019t fall into any known grouping, McNealy said. Another feature that set this strain apart: When hit with ultraviolet light, many Legionella<\/em> strains fluoresce blue, red or yellow, but L. <\/em>clemsonensis <\/em>fluoresced green.
\nIf Legionella<\/em> is inhaled by someone who is elderly or immunocompromised it could lead to a treatable form of pneumonia. The bacteria live in biofilms of all manmade water systems and are found in freshwater lakes, streams and rivers. Around 4,000 to 5,000 cases of waterborne bacterial outbreaks are reported annually in the U.S., an estimate that is probably low, McNealy said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Clemson family has gained a new namesake: Legionella clemsonensis, a novel strain of the Legionella bacteria, the most common cause of waterborne bacterial outbreaks in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) gave the honor of naming L. clemsonensis to students in a collaborative research group called CU and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":16523,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[299,556,846,1574,1789,2268,2391,3306,3312],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-16520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-these-hills","tag-bacteria","tag-cdc","tag-creative-inquiry","tag-in-these-hills","tag-legionella","tag-pneumonia","tag-research-news","tag-winter-2017","tag-winter-2017-in-these-hills"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2016\/12\/Clemsonensis-in-the-lab.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16520"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=16520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}