Congratulations to Lola Holcomb, PhD candidate in the Graduate School for Biomedical Sciences and Engineering program, for winning a graduate student research award from the Bioscience Association of Maine!!
Over the next few months, she’ll focus on characterizing candidate anti-inflammatory bacterial species and genes of the gut microbiome, using whole genome sequence data from bacteria we previously isolated during a broccoli sprout diet study. This is part of Lola’s larger PhD project investigating which bacteria produce sulforphane in the gut, how they do it, and under which circumstances. It complements the collective lab research on how broccoli sprouts and gut microbes can be used to resolve Inflammatory Bowel Disease.
Lola Holcomb, B.S.
Doctorate of Philosophy candidate, Biomedical Science
Lola entered as a rotating first-year GSBSE student in March 2022, and declared the Ishaq Lab her dissertation lab soon after. Troubled with indecisiveness and the desire to research, well, everything, she quickly found that using bioinformatics and big data as a lens to study microbial ecology (and in time, its relation to social equity) allowed her to do the kind of meaningful interdisciplinary research she’s always wanted to do. Lola is currently working on 16s data analysis for other ongoing lab projects, comparing gut microbiomes of mouse models of Inflammatory Bowel Disease with broccoli as a dietary treatment. Lola is currently doing 16S data analysis for ongoing lab projects and developing a metagenomic analysis workflow to compare gut microbiomes of mouse models of Inflammatory Bowel Disease with broccoli as a dietary treatment. In addition to research, she instructs a graduate-level Genetics course, tutors several Biology undergraduate students, and serves as a GSBSE senator in the Graduate Student Government here at UMaine.
The Ishaq Lab 