This week we celebrated with our 4th annual ‘State of the Lab’ address. Our past year was commemorated with: ☕️📄manuscript mugs for our 3 recent papers; 👩🏻‍🔬🍺 a beaker mug for our outgoing high-school co-op student; and a big virus cookie! 🍪

What an honour it was to meet you at @UofT (where it all began!) today, Dr. Iwasaki @VirusesImmunity. You continue to inspire so many with your outstanding science and service! 👏🏼🤩 And today I learned you are also so humble, genuine, and kind! Keep blazing! 🙌🏼🔥

We attended the Canadian Society for Virology meeting @usask this week #CSV2024 So proud of my students, winning poster awards & giving outstanding rapid fire talks! 😎 What a privilege to be part of the @CanSocVirol community! Thanks to our colleagues supporting our work! 🙏🏼

Warm weather & conference season is finally here, hooray! 😎 🏆Congrats to Arvin, my stellar PhD student on his well-deserved conference award @UofTCellSysBiol @UtscBiology 🚴🏽‍♀️Celebrating this new season with my first bike to work of 2024, enjoying our beautiful @UTSC campus

We used our lab's unique flow virometry protocols to demonstrate LPS loading on virus particles, and then showed that LPS-loaded viruses could trigger TLR4 signalling and inflammatory cytokine expression.

🚨New paper alert: HIV acts as a viral courier for LPS! 🚛🦠 Our paper today in @JVirology shows that HIV particles with CD14 on their surface can bind bacterial LPS, and shuttle LPS to bystander immune cells to elicit TLR4 signalling and gene expression: journals.asm.org/doi/full/10…

Felt super special bringing my PhD supervisor @kgeekat to come see my own lab @UTSC Bonus: having my F1 join, and her getting very excited about science, too! 🧪 Grateful to have had such a supportive and fun mentor to start my career! 🙏🏼👩🏻‍🔬 #mentorship #womeninSTEM

Was great to connect with @UofT Dept of Immunology students and faculty while running @HighParkNC today! @uoftmedicine Kudos to past and present dept chairs toeing the line and making it look easy!

Guzzo lab has made new & exciting discoveries on #HIV! 🤩 We used flow virometry to screen the HIV surface for 360 different human proteins, and discovered CD38, CD97 & CD278 present at high levels An ambitious and fruitful study! 💪🏻😎 Paper link here: nature.com/articles/s41598-0…

The Guzzo Lab reflected on our year of achievements by reading our lab memory cards, and an afternoon at the Christmas market @DistilleryTO 👏🥂🎄 We are wishing everyone a restful and memorable holiday with loved ones! 🥰