Food Science #1

A couple of weeks back, we had the official launch event for our ARC Industrial Transformation Training Centre. This was originally named the Food Omics Research Centre (FORC), however the Australian Research Council didn't like our name and instead told us that we would be called the ARC Training Centre for Molecular Technology in the Food Industry. Go ahead and see if you can make a good acronym out of that!

Now that we have an official name, we realised that we hadn't had a formal launch event for our Centre (which has now been up and running for over a year). We went ahead and had a very successful launch event with various dignitaries including Senator Arthur Sinodinos, and Professor Aiden Byrne, CEO of the Australian Research Council.

One of the central purposes of this funding scheme is to train PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in collaborative research with industry. We were funded in the first round of this scheme, and arguably, we are one of the most successful of these Centres as we have our full allotment of 10 PhD students working on collaborative projects with our industry partners.

Students and staff of the ARC Training Centre for Molecular Technology in the Food Industry

Single Molecule Imaging

We recently hosted a visit from Antoine van Oijen from Wollongong University. Antoine is a fellow ARC Laureate Fellow (not often one can use the word fellow three time in one sentence), who is doing very cool single molecule imaging work. Antoine was a faculty member at Harvard and Groningen before he moved out to Australia, so it's a great coup for Wollongong to recruit him. 
We had some fun discussions about possible collaborative projects and he gave a great seminar while visiting MQ. Hopefully, I'll get the opportunity soon to visit his labs down in Wollongong.

I'm not sure what this is, but it has pretty colours and I got the image from Antoine's web page.

So You Think You can Synthesise Season 2

Last year you may recall the gold medal-winning Macquarie University iGEM team ran an online synthetic biology-themed reality series called So You Think You can Synthesise. This years Macquarie University iGEM team is busy beavering away on their synthetic biology project Solar Synthesisers. As part of the "human practises" (I would translate this iGEM-ism as "Outreach") segment of their project, they are creating So You Think You can Synthesise Season 2.

I'm blogging about this not just to give them a gratuitous advertisement, but also because I was involved in filming the final episode yesterday. While only episodes 1 and 2 are currently up on Youtube at the moment, the final episode has now been filmed, and I know who won, bwahahahaha. However, my lips are sealed. One spoiler I can reveal is that the final episode has a Japanese Iron Chef theme. The reason I know is that I was brought in to play the role of Chairman Kaga, the host of the Iron Chef TV show.

I should mention that I was a big fan of the Japanese Iron Chef, and one of the culinary highlights of my life was attending a dinner function where Hiroki Sakai (Iron Chef French) and Chen Kenichi (Iron Chef Chinese) each cooked a course.

Placeholder Iron Chef photo until I locate the photo of me with Hiroki Sakai and Chen Kenichi

If its my birthday, this must be Canberra

Yesterday was my birthday, and for the third year out of four, I've spent it in Canberra, serving on an NHMRC grant review panel. I've been in Canberra all week, reviewing 75 microbiology grants. I feel a little depressed about it, as grant success rates may drop as low as 10% this year, which means an awful lot of very good grants will not be funded. On the bright side, my panel arranged a birthday cake for me!

Its my birthday and I have a cake, thanks to my grant review panel

Catching up #2- Centre of Excellence

The main reason I've been missing in action on the blogging front is I've been working on a large grant application for an ARC Centre of Excellence. We've put together a bid for a Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology led by Macquarie. Thanks to the heroic efforts of our team across six universities we managed to get a good looking application submitted last Wednesday, now we need to wait and cross our fingers (toes, eyes, and whatever is crossable).

Centres of Excellence always make me think of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Hopefully, we won't have a heinous outcome.

Catching Up #1- Exams

It's been over a month since my last post. It's been pretty crazy over that time. It started with hiding at home for a week to mark 100 exams papers for my unit Molecular Biology and Genomics. I was entertained by a number of artistic efforts, the highlight of which is the answer to question 14 below. There was also a large number of cat drawings, I particularly liked the answer from one student where they used drawings of a cat with/without a tail to discuss the potential phenotypic effects of gene knockouts.

An interesting response from one of my students to exam question 14- How does TATA binding protein interact with type II eukaryotic promoters that lack a TATA box?

Is it a prop out of a sci fi movie?

So I posted a few weeks about Serious Equipment needing a Serious Crane. While the PacBioRSII is a cool piece of equipment, it basically looks like a big box. Nowhere near as cool looking as this crazy thing:

I think we got this from a Star Trek movie set

Or maybe its a steampunk thingie from Girl Genius

It seems to be looking at me

OK so these are pictures of the Time-of-Flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (TOF-SIMS) instrument that has just been installed at UNSW. I was part of a team led by Mike Manefield and Federico Lauro that attracted funding for this instrument from the Australian Research Council. I'd never seen pictures of one until Federico showed me these, its truly a crazy looking thing. What this thing does is fire a pulsed beam of ions at a sample, and then it can identify the compounds present by collecting secondary ions produced by running them through a mass spec. It can thus produce a image map with a sub-micron resolution showing what chemicals are present. We hope to use it to analyze the metabolic activities of different bacteria within complex communities.