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?