Zannah Salter

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575 Posts
Research Assistant. Microbiome 🦠 pathogen genomics 🧬 STEM Ambassador (and also interested in goth stuff πŸ–€ capoeira πŸ€Έβ€β™€οΈ and crafts 🧢)
Based in Cambridge, UK. She/her.
Twitterhttps://twitter.com/Zannah_Du
ORCIDhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-3898-8504

Just a week away! Come to St Giles Church (#CambridgeUK) on Saturday 21st March 2026 for #Brahms' German Requiem. We are joined by two excellent soloists and our wonderful friends from the Academy of Great St Mary's orchestra (@agsm ) πŸŽΆπŸ’œ

Advance tickets are available from ADC box office via the QR code below!
#ChoralMusic #choir

@dx @typeswitch Nearish to the city of Cambridge is a town called March.

So, every spring, a group of slightly unhinged people from the Cambridge area (mostly present or former academics or students from the University of Cambridge, for historical reasons) get themselves to March and walk together back to Cambridge. It's called the March March March.

(I think the town's name is etymologically related, distantly, to walking but not to the month.)

The new season is nearly upon us! If you love singing choral music, come along for our first rehearsal on 15th Sep 2025, 7.45pm, Stapleford School Hall (CB22 5BJ).

#ChoralMusic #CambridgeUK #choir

Summer is certainly upon us! Join us on Saturday 5th July 2025, 7 30pm at St Andrew's Church, Stapleford. We have a lovely selection of music to share from Bach, Bruckner, Pounds, Handel ...!

#ChoralMusic #CambridgeUK #Stapleford #choir #Bach #bruckner #Handel

This paper wraps up an incredibly fruitful collaboration made possible by the Cambridge-Africa ALBORADA Research Fund.

Give it a read, share your thoughts, and reach out if you'd like to chat about #Ornithobacterium! 🦠

One final detail is that Celine managed to isolate and sequence the dainty 1.4Mb genome of a novel species of #Helcococcus that is strongly associated with O. hominis.

We've called it Helcococcus ekapensis (with reference to Ekapa, the Xhosa name for Cape Town) - hoping to learn more about that bug in future!

Meanwhile, I looked at how the #microbiome differs between children who carry O. hominis (before and after acquisition), and children who don't.

The availability of a large 16S dataset, allowing us to curate a subset of well matched carriers/non-carriers, was a huge advantage here.

Fortunately we were able to use some prior #16S and #metagenomic data to identify candidate samples from the enormous archive!

Postdoc Siobhan Brigg laid the groundwork and MSc student Celine De Allende took up the challenge: culturing, sequencing, analysing the genomes.

This project started out as a collaboration between our team & Felix Dube's at the University of Cape Town, attempting to cultivate the first African isolates of the nasopharyngeal bacterium O. hominis...

But it isn't easy to find a slow growing, fastidious bug with variable colony morphology!

Very pleased to share this preprint!

"Characterisation of Ornithobacterium hominis colonisation dynamics and interaction with the nasopharyngeal microbiome in a South African birth cohort"

🧡

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.24.655922v1.article-metrics

Characterisation of Ornithobacterium hominis colonisation dynamics and interaction with the nasopharyngeal microbiome in a South African birth cohort.

Ornithobacterium hominis is a recently described Gram-negative bacterium that colonises the human nasopharynx and may be associated with poor upper respiratory tract health. Here, we describe the isolation of O. hominis from samples collected from a South African birth cohort, creating the first archive of cultured strains of the species from Africa. Sequenced genomes from this archive reveal that South African O. hominis is more similar to Australian strains than those from Southeast Asia, and that it may share genes with other members of the microbiome that are relevant for virulence, colonisation, and antibiotic resistance. Leveraging existing microbiome data from the cohort, O. hominis was found to be closely associated with bacterial co-colonisers that are rare in non-carrier individuals, including Suttonella, Helcococcus, Moraxella spp., and Gracilibacteria. Their collective acquisition has a significant impact on the diversity of nasopharyngeal communities that contain O. hominis . Individuals who have not yet acquired O. hominis have a higher abundance of Moraxella (particularly M. lincolnii ) than individuals who never acquire O. hominis , suggesting that this could be a precursor state for successful colonisation. Finally, a novel co-coloniser species, Helcococcus ekapensis , was successfully isolated and sequenced. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Cambridge Africa ALBORADA Research Fund, G115009 Gates Foundation, OPP1017641, OPP1017579 NIH H3Africa, 1U01AI110466-01A1 Wellcome Trust, 221372/Z/20/Z

bioRxiv