ASM is launching the Detection to Protection Initiative, bringing leading voices together to lay out a specific, expert-validated blueprint to address emerging infectious and zoonotic disease threats.

Congratulations to Heather Richard on starting her post-graduate career in conservation with Scarborough Land Trust as Marsh Project Director! Heather has been a grad student working with me, mycologist Pete Avis, ecologists Andy Rominger and Brian McGill, engineer Jean MacRae, and geochemist Tomoko Komada, for the past few years to study Maine coastal salt marshes. Long before she joined my lab to work on microbial communities in some of Maine’s coastal salt marshes, Heather was an ecologist, educator, and bioinformatician.

This fall, I will be attending three conferences/workshops to present my lab's research, as well as to learn from others. Maine Public Health Association 2026 Annual Conference Thursday, October 1, 2026 @ 8:00 am – 4:30 pm, at the Augusta Civic Center, 76 Community Drive, Augusta, Maine This will be my first time attending MPHA’s annual conference, to present research on our…

The University of Maine is a community of more than 11,900 undergraduate and graduate students, and 2,500 employees located on the Orono campus, the regional campus in Machias, and throughout the stat...

Playlist · Sue · 48 items · 12 saves

As far as auspicious beginnings go, listening to dozens of tropical birds share news in a blooming city park while watching the rising sun peek out of the clouds leftover from a pre-dawn rain, the city traffic a distant hum under the nearby laughter of morning walkers watching their dogs frolic, is a heck of a way to begin a week-long conference on microbes and global health.

The Stewardship of Microbiomes in Human and Environmental Systems special collection is open at Sustainable Microbiology! The collection is led by senior editor, and principal investigator of the Microbiome Stewardship group, Dr. Kieran O’Doherty, and will feature invited contributions. Starting with the foundational framework paper, the collection establishes clear guiding principles, premises, core responsibilities, and case studies for preserving microbial biodiversity across diverse habitats.

Events will be hosted January - December in 2026, on the last Wednesday of every month, 11:00 - 13:00 pm ET. Presented over Zoom. After each talk, we will continue the discussions in an informal social meeting with MSE. All speakers and members of the audience are welcome to join the social meeting. Hosted by: Sue Ishaq, MSE, and finacially supported by the University of Maine Institute of Medicine, and the Applied Microbiology International via the…

Sometimes dreams do come true - I am finally getting a chance to visit New Zealand, thanks to my new role as co-Vice-Chair of the Ethics, Conservation and Management Planning Working Group (other Co-Vice Chair is Louis-Patrick Haraoui) of the new Microbial Conservation Specialist Group of the IUCN Species Survival Commission (IUCN SSC MCSG ECMP). While the number of words in that group's formal name implies that it's going to take a long time to accomplish anything, the new MCSG group is actually a nimble collaboration of researchers and policy makers who are working on conserving the microbial communities that allow us to thrive on this planet.

Events will be hosted January - December in 2026, on the last Wednesday of every month, 11:00 - 13:00 pm ET. Presented over Zoom. After each talk, we will continue the discussions in an informal social meeting with MSE. All speakers and members of the audience are welcome to join the social meeting. Hosted by: Sue Ishaq, MSE, and finacially supported by the University of Maine Institute of Medicine, and the Applied Microbiology International via the…

Microbiomes are vital for the health of humans, animals, plants, and the planet, providing key metabolic and ecological functions, but. it's not easy to decide how to preserve or care for them, who should be responsible, and how to know the strategy succeeded. Microbiome scientists have increasingly been demonstrating the importance of microbial ecologies for human and environmental health. In spite of this, no protections are in place on policy levels to ensure the health of microbiomes, which in turn are the foundation of larger ecosystems. 

This project was led by Drs. Shuhua Bai and Yanyan Li, to explore the isolation of nanoscale particles from broccoli, specially, exosomes which are small vesicles from broccoli cells that store bioactives. Because of their size, they can be used to reduce inflammation even when a broccoli-based diet can't be used. Natural Broccoli Sprout–Derived Exosomes Encapsulating Bioactive Molecules as a Novel Nanomedicine for Repair of Intestinal Inflammation…

I'm delighted to announce the publication of a new article that lays the foundation for assessing and implementing goals for good stewardship of microbial communities. Microbiomes are vital for the health of humans, animals, plants, and the planet, providing key metabolic and ecological functions, but. it's not easy to decide how to preserve or care for them, who should be responsible, and how to know the strategy succeeded.

Abstract. Microbiomes are essential for ecosystem, plant, animal, and human health. There is accumulating evidence that changes to microbiomes from anthrop

Events will be hosted January - December in 2026, on the last Wednesday of every month, 11:00 - 13:00 pm ET. Presented over Zoom. After each talk, we will continue the discussions in an informal social meeting with MSE. All speakers and members of the audience are welcome to join the social meeting. Hosted by: Sue Ishaq, MSE, and finacially supported by the University of Maine Institute of Medicine, and the Applied Microbiology International via the…

Recently, we celebrated all things microbial at the 2nd Northern New England Microbiome Symposium, which I hosted at UMaine. The first symposium was held at UVM in 2024, and the organizing committee and I are thrilled to see such enthusiasm for keeping this going! Federico Sisti at the NNE Microbiome Symposium Microbiomes are fascinating collectives to study! They are found everywhere on the globe and in every ecosystem, they survive in places which are inhospitable to most other forms of life, and their survival strategies challenge us on a daily basis.

The Maine Farmcast, a podcast led by my friends and colleagues at UMaine Cooperative Extension, Drs. Colt Knight and Glenda Pereira, invited me to chat about my research and teaching recently. Check out Episode 111: 'Gut Check, Microbiomes in Agriculture and Health with Dr. Sue Ishaq'! I had a lot of fun catching up with Colt and sharing horror stories about messy research on the farm and in the lab.

Events will be hosted January - December in 2026, on the last Wednesday of every month, 11:00 - 13:00 pm ET. Presented over Zoom. After each talk, we will continue the discussions in an informal social meeting with MSE. All speakers and members of the audience are welcome to join the social meeting. Hosted by: Sue Ishaq, MSE, and finacially supported by the University of Maine Institute of Medicine, and the Applied Microbiology International via the…

The 2nd Northern New England Microbiome Symposium Whether we are interested in the way coastal wetlands sequester carbon, how diet affects us differently, or how public and environmental health are inextricably linked – research on the microbiome can reveal how systems connect. Join us for two days to learn about how microbial communities impact ecosystems, food production, health, and more; to hear from experts researching these issues in New England and beyond; and discuss the technology and data analysis which can boost your own research.

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The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposes to revise the Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance to improve government- wide policies and requirements related to the management of grants, co...

Congratulations to Ashley Reynolds and Ethan Glenn for their first publication!! This extensive literature review was the result of more than a year of dedicated researching, writing, and revising to synthesize existing knowledge on how diet can affect neuroinflammation and how gut microbes are involved. Titled "Plant-Derived Bioactives, the Gut–Brain Axis, and Neurodegenerative Diseases: Mechanistic Roles of Diet–Microbiota Interactions…

We’ve all felt the thrill of synchronicity when meeting someone for the first time and realizing how we have much in common, but when this occurs for a dozen people simultaneously, who go on to share ideas and excitement for 13 hours straight, it’s magic. Thus, Professor of Anthropology, Roberta Raffeta’, created magic when she invited a group of microbiome and health science researchers together for the “Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Data in Microbiome Research and Postgenomics: Toward an Interdisciplinary Dialogue” workshop at the…

With a suitcase full of chocolate and a notebook full of ideas, I said goodbye to Ghent, Belgium after a 4-day visit. I was generously invited here to give a seminar to the Interdisciplinary Medical and Health Seminar series which is co-organized by the Department of Public Health and Primary Care and the Department of Internal Medicine and Pediatrics, and to brainstorm about nutrition and food science, health equity, and gut microbiomes.

Last week, we completed our third sequencing workshop with Illumina, and we are grateful to Katherine Sullivan, Cameron Robertson, Curtis Provencher, and Michelle Benitez for their patience, expertise, and encouragement. Their sponsorship provided the opportunity for 7 students, plus me, and Alex and Megan at UMaine CORE, to learn how to prepare their samples for sequencing. We are also grateful to Alex Sacco, …

As the academic year draws to a close (for the students), a flurry of awards ceremonies recognize their dedication and ingenuity. This year, as every year, the Ishaq Lab is grateful for all we have to celebrate! Only about a third of the lab was able to make it to our end of the semester good-bye party, but I look forward to their celebrating their continued successess in the lab and beyond.

The 2nd Northern New England Microbiome Symposium Whether we are interested in the way coastal wetlands sequester carbon, how diet affects us differently, or how public and environmental health are inextricably linked – research on the microbiome can reveal how systems connect. Join us for two days to learn about how microbial communities impact ecosystems, food production, health, and more; to hear from experts researching these issues in New England and beyond; and discuss the technology and data analysis which can boost your own research.

Today was a blast at the Microbiome Workshop on Long-Read Amplicon Library Generation, the second in a series of hands-on workshops this spring that I have been coorganizing with Alex Sacco, Genomics Facility Manager at UMaine! This one was led by Alex, who is a genius at sorting out the complex math and coordination to combine multiple projcts with multiple targets onto one Oxford Nanopore Technology flow cell!!

Events will be hosted January - December in 2026, on the last Wednesday of every month, 11:00 - 13:00 pm ET. Presented over Zoom. After each talk, we will continue the discussions in an informal social meeting with MSE. All speakers and members of the audience are welcome to join the social meeting. Hosted by: Sue Ishaq, MSE, and finacially supported by the University of Maine Institute of Medicine, and the Applied Microbiology International via the…

The 2nd Northern New England Microbiome Symposium Whether we are interested in the way coastal wetlands sequester carbon, how diet affects us differently, or how public and environmental health are inextricably linked – research on the microbiome can reveal how systems connect. Join us for two days to learn about how microbial communities impact ecosystems, food production, health, and more; to hear from experts researching these issues in New England and beyond; and discuss the technology and data analysis which can boost your own research.

Events will be hosted January - December in 2026, on the last Wednesday of every month, 11:00 - 13:00 pm ET. Presented over Zoom. After each talk, we will continue the discussions in an informal social meeting with MSE. All speakers and members of the audience are welcome to join the social meeting. Hosted by: Sue Ishaq, MSE, and finacially supported by the University of Maine Institute of Medicine, and the Applied Microbiology International via the…