Greetings from Tuscany!

I am currently in Tuscany for the Gordon Research Conference on Multidrug Efflux Systems. This is the first time I've been able to attend this meeting since the very first one in 2003. There are actually a few hundred different Gordon Research Conferences (GRC), each on a different scientific topic. I'll be at another GRC in August in Hong Kong. GRCs are typically smallish meetings (100-150 scientists) held in relatively remote locations, so attendees are "trapped" at the meeting. I've always liked this format, as you eat all meals together and stay at the same location, so it provides a great opportunity to meet people and chat about science.

GRCs encourage speakers to present unpublished data, but this has the consequence that all presentations at the conference are confidential so I can't blog about any of the cool science being discussed. I guess I can at least chat about presentations from my own group. I gave a talk and Karl had a poster on our work on the new family of drug efflux pumps that we have discovered. My talk seemed to generate alot of interest as I had about fifteen people ask questions at the end of my talk. The good thing about talking early in the meeting is I don't have to stress over my talk, and I can relax and enjoy the rest of the GRC.

This GRC meeting is held at the the Il Ciocco Resort which is near Lucca in Tuscany. It is a very attractive location, though currently somewhat foggy and rainy.

View from my window this morning

Thanks to Karl Hassan for finding this cartoon. It's not quite this bad.

Syn Bio and twitter

Well I've so far avoided getting on twitter (or facebook) as I have enough time sinks already. This probably makes me a fossil. I recently hosted a planning meeting to start organizing a bid for a Synthetic Biology Centre. My colleague Louise Brown is very active on twitter, and commemorated the occasion with this tweet.  

In case you don't want to follow the link, here's the photo of us

JAMS turns 4, Blog turns 3

Well, I'm a month or so late, but JAMS (Joint Academic Microbial Seminars) had its 4th birthday, and celebrated in its usual fashion by holding an afternoon symposium, followed by dinner at the Australian Museum.Excellent speakers as usual, the highlight for me was Kat Holt's talk on using genomics to understand the epidemiology and evolution of bacterial pathogens causing diseases such as typhoid and dysentery.

A talk on typhoid and dysentery is of course a perfect lead in to dinner, which was in the dinosaur room. A great chance to catch up with colleagues and friends, except for the second year the band was so loud, it was hard to converse with anyone (yes I've become an old fuddy-duddy, plus I'm also somewhat deaf).

I know when JAMS has its birthday, it is also the birthday for this blog as one of my first blog posts was about the first JAMS symposium. So happy birthday all round!

Yay! Biggest ever attendance for a JAMS meeting. Who is that thoughtful looking fellow there in the front row?

Grants and My friend the Chocolate Cake

I'm miles behind on my blogging, but in the meantime we've written an ARC Discovery Grant and three National Health and Medical Research Grants. The  last of those were submitted to Canberra today. As I was walking home from University today I was listening to some old 1990s music on my headphones, and happened to be listening to "I've got a plan" by My Friend the Chocolate Cake.

The lyrics "I've got another plan, this time it will work" seemed appropriate given the grant writing we've been doing to try to attract funding for our on-going research to investigate mechanisms of virulence in the pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii, to understand how bacteria control drug efflux pumps that make their resistant to antibiotics, and to see if we can use "friendly" plant root bacteria to protect against agricultural crops against plant pathogens. Now we just have to wait eight months or so to see if any of these projects get funded.

This totally looks like the chocolate mud cakes from cafes in Glebe that I used to live on when I was a PhD student

Fitbits!

How do you motivate me to do something I don't want to? Turn it into a game or competition!

For Valentine's Day, I bought Fitbit flexs for Phyllis and myself. A somewhat courageous choice of present that seems to have worked out well. Fitbits are wearable devices that can track your activity (exercise, sleep patterns, etc).

So, I now know that walking  from my home to Macquarie University in the morning through the Lane Cove National Park is 4.8 km and takes 5,700 steps (which puts me along way towards the daily goal of 10,000 steps).

The odd thing is that even though I have not work a watch for over twenty years, I find myself trying to check the time on my Fitbit flex many times a day.

Warning- scary closeup of my arm

Mind those sausage-stealing kookaburras

I was out at the Sydney Institute of Marine Sciences (SIMS) last Friday. I gave a guest lecture to finish up the SIMS-CMB Summer Course on Marine Microbial Ecology. Suhelen Egan at UNSW has been organizing this course for the last few years, this has been the first time I've actually been able to make it. It was a fun day, Martin from my group was able to get a portable flow sorter setup and the students were able to sort cyanobacterial cells from Sydney Harbour water they had collected that morning.

I gave the final presentation of the workshop, which had the added advantage that I was there for the celebratory BBQ at the end of the workshop. The only danger were the local sausage-stealing kookaburras. One of the students was a favourite target of the kookaburras, losing several BBQ-ed sausages to them. Next year we might had to add an extra lecture to the course on how to defend your food from kookaburras.

Kookaburra at SIMS. Actually food-stealing kookaburras are a problem at Macquarie Univerity as well- I once lost a lemon poppyseed muffin to a kookaburra

Welcome Lisa!

We're very pleased to welcome Professor Lisa Moore from the University of Southern Maine, who is visiting us on sabbatical for four months. Lisa's visit is supported by a prestigious Endeavour Foundation Fellowship. Lisa is an expert on the physiology of Prochlorococcus, a photosynthetic marine cyanobacterium that is one of the key primary producers underlying the entire marine food web.
Fun fact- there are an estimated 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Prochlorococcus cells in the world's oceans.
We will be collaborating with Lisa on sequencing and bioinformatic analyses of marine cyanobacterial samples from around the world's oceans.

Lisa