Talking Head

I was on the Channel 7 News a couple of nights ago- link here. Not because I had done anything newsworthy myself, but Channel 7 contacted me at about 2 pm that day to see if I was willing to present an expert opinion on the effects of probiotics on the human gut microbiome and human health. There was a recent paper from a Danish group suggesting there was little evidence that probiotics have a significant effect on the gut microbiome in healthy people. In a moment of weakness I agreed, and was then interviewed about half an hour later in my lab, including filming me pipetting into Eppendorf tubes, which the rest of my lab group found tremendously amusing.

Congratulations Dr Deepa Varkey

I have a bit of a massive backlog of stuff to blog about, so let me combine 3 posts into one. Congratulations are due to Deepa Varkey for:
1. finishing her PhD on temperature adaptation of marine cyanobacteria
2. getting a postdoc position at the c3 Institute at UTS working with Peter Ralph and Justin Seymour.
3. publishing her first big paper in the ISME journal on the effects of low temperature on tropical and temperate isolates of the marine cyanobacterium Synechococcus. Deepa also won an award for this paper from the Biomolecular Frontiers Research Centre for the best paper by an early career researcher in the Centre in 2015.

Good luck with the new job Deepa, we'll miss you here (and don't forget about writing up the other manuscripts from your PhD for publication!)

Synthetic Biology Cutting Edge Symposium

I succeeded in getting out of bed at 4.40 am this morning (a minor miracle), in order to catch an early morning flight from Sydney to Canberra. Fortunately everything ran smoothly, and I managed to make it in time to the Synthetic Biology Cutting Edge Symposium which was being held at the War Memorial in Canberra. I don't think I've been to the War Memorial since I was five years old, and its clearly changed since there's no longer a Japanese Miniature Submarine out the front. Anyway, I had no time to actually visit any of the exhibits, as I was giving a talk on "Yeast 2.0 and Beyond" at the first session in the Symposium.

I very much enjoyed todays talks. Joel Cherry from Amyris gave a mind blowing talk about their progress on making industrial biochemicals using yeast, the scale of the syn bio capabilities with robotic platforms was very impressive. Jane Calvert from Edinburgh gave a very interesting talk on using social sciences to study synthetic biology. And Siouxsie Wiles gave a cool talk on using animation, movies, social media and a wide variety of other tools for public outreach of her science.

Unfortunately, I had to leave this afternoon to return home for carer duties, so I'll miss the rest of the symposium.

The War Memorial, interesting place for a scientific conference, first time I've ever given a talk with two Australian flags flying behind me. If there were another 7 or so I could have imagined I was Tony Abbott.

JAMS Turns Five

Yesterday was the JAMS (Joint Academic Microbiology Seminars) Annual Symposium and Dinner at the Australian Museum. This represents the fifth birthday of JAMS, not bad for an idea that originated in a pub discussion with Federico Lauro, Mike Manefield, Andy Holmes and myself. JAMS also had a record turnout with 122 attendees.
 
Once again there was an excellent array of speakers in the afternoon session. Gene Tyson from the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics gave a fantastic talk on novel methanogens (methane-producing bacteria) in diverse environments including melting permafrost in Scandinavia and Australian coal deposits. John Zehr from the University of California at Santa Cruz gave a fascinating presentation on identifying novel nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria in the ocean that live in symbiosis with eukaryotic plankton. I very much enjoyed Mark Schembri's talk analyzing the reasons for the global success of the urinary tract pathogen E. coli ST131.

I was unable to attend the dinner this year as I had carer duties at home, but congratulations are due to Hasinika Ariyatne in my group who won the prize for Best Poster.

Not those sort of JAMS

Gavin Thomas visit

We're currently hosting Dr Gavin Thomas from the University of York, who is out here for a sabbatical visit for a few weeks. Gavin and I first crossed paths back in 2000, when I was a new faculty member at TIGR, and he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK. Gavin invited me over to give a seminar and I stayed for a few days and was shown round the local tourist-y spots, I remember visiting swamps and historic houses.

Gavin and I have shared a long term interest in transporters- proteins that move nutrients, ions, toxic compounds, etc into or out of cells; and both of us have been using a mixture of computational and wet lab approaches to characterize novel types of transporters. While he is here we are collaborating on refining computational approaches for identifying the substrates of transporters.

Gavin from his University of York web page

Happy New Year

Hi all!
No, my blog isn't defunct. I apologise for no postings for three months, but I've been away on leave for most of that time dealing with a family medical emergency. Hopefully, I can now start to catch up with my backlog of blogging (and everything else).
Happy New Year to everyone,

Ian