Will Wasielewski | 2025 I.S. Symposium

My project examined the invasive salamander skin pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) and its influence on a local salamander population. For the past 9 years, Dr Lehtinen’s IS students have surveyed northern two lined salamanders for bd prevalence. For my IS, I continued this long-term monitoring project, and expanded on it by exploring the relationship between the salamander skin microbiome composition and Bd.

To this end, we extracted DNA from 100 wild salamanders, and used 16s v3-v4 metagenomic sequencing to compare infected versus uninfected wild salamander skin microbiomes. Using this technique, we identified that known Bd-inhibiting genera are present on both infected and uninfected individuals, and we identified two taxa that were significantly differentially abundant between infected and uninfected salamanders.