Bon Voyage Amy!

The Paulsen lab went for an outing to the pub Friday night, we went to The Ranch to farewell Amy Cain. Amy is leaving our group take up a postdoctoral position at the Sanger Centre in England, where she will be working in Julian Parkhill’s group. We wish Amy the best of luck there, if anyone is heading over near Cambridge say hi to Amy for us!

Those members of my group who were too slow to avoid the camera- from left to right: Sophie, Martin, Karl, Amy, Kent, Prasanth, Daniel

Science in Gaming

I’ve become increasingly interested in the portrayal of science, particularly microbiology, in the media. This is an issue I intend to explore across a series of blog posts. I decided to start with looking at science in gaming. The picture shows Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory with his game “Research Lab”- where the physics is theoretical but the fun is real! Sadly the fun isn’t really real as the game doesn’t actually exist (yet).

Anyway, there are lots of games where one plays as a soldier, cop/detective, criminal, etc. How about games where one can play as a scientist? And specifically as a microbiologist? 

A very few come to mind-

Pandemic is a great board game. In Pandemic you try and save the world from a series of disease outbreaks- battling to contain the pandemics to give yourselves enough time to race for the disease cures. So, just like my job every day :)

In Half Life of course you play as the crowbar-wielding theoretical physicist Gordon Freeman. I haven't come across any games yet with crowbar-wielding microbiologists.

Um, struggling to come up with anything else. Mordin Solus is probably my favourite character in Mass Effect- well along with Garrus.

Now, there’s no shortage of evil Mad Scientist Villains in games, but can anyone think of other games where one can play as a scientist? Or in which scientists are portrayed in a positive manner?

Must remember to turn up to my lectures!

My lectures start this week in my 3rd year unit- CBMS336 Molecular Biology and Genomics. Now I just need to remember to turn up for them! Those of you who know me, may be aware I'm getting increasingly vague these days (probably from pouring too many polyacrylamide sequencing gels when I was a young scientist- damn the neurotoxic properties of acrylamide, or maybe being vague is just part of the job description of being a professor), so I do worry about forgetting to turn up to my own lectures. This week will have the excitement of me getting tangled up in slinkies trying to demonstrate DNA transcription.

don't try this at home

What does the title of this blog mean?

A couple of people have asked me “what does the title of your blog actually mean?” Let me try and answer that.

Over the course of 3.5 billion years or so of evolution bacteria have adapted to survive and flourish in essentially every ecological niche on the planet. One of the main research interests of my group is understanding at a genomic and genetic level how particular bacteria have adapted to their environment. In essence, what are the lifestyle choices of bacteria?

The word “lifestyle” appears to be making repeated appearances in our grant applications. One of our current ARC Discovery projects (DP110102718) is called “Lifestyle choices: genomic analysis of niche adaptations in marine Synechococcus”. The NHMRC grant that Karl and I just wrote is titled “Tolerating a stressful lifestyle: drug resistance in the nosocomial pathogen A. baumannii”. 

Over time hopefully this blog will look into some of the microbial lifestyles our research group is investigating.

Not my lifestyle choice, but these guys like it. Microbial slimes in limestone caves beneath the Nullabor Plain (photo coutesy of Peter Rogers)

Scary stuff you can find on the internet

You can find all sorts of scary stuff on the internet these days. For instance, Macquarie Uni put up this video on YouTube of me gesticulating like a mad man.

This is a talk I gave at a dinner event at MQ for High Achieving year 11 students from Sydney High Schools. The event was aimed at attracting promising students to study science at MQ. I was very impressed with the enthusiasm and scientific insight from the students at the dinner, I think I got better questions there than I have had at some scientific conferences. The host for the evening was Australian tv science personality Adam Spencer, who was highly entertaining.

At this stage, the video clearly has not yet gone viral yet, judging by the number of YouTube views- the vast majority of which I suspect are from my relatives :).

Karl puts his life on the line for our grant!

It seems like it has been raining in Sydney straight for the last four months. In Wagga Wagga in rural NSW even the spiders are having to move to high ground to avoid the floods. You may have seen crazy pictures of their spider webs elsewhere on the web:

We haven't really had serious floods in Sydney itself, but Karl (a senior postdoc in my lab) had to wade through the waters below in order to make it to Macquarie University to work on our NHMRC grant.

Karl made it safely to work, but the same cannot be said for his thongs (if you aren't Australian, this means flip-flops, I know the US definition of a thong would make this post very different) which were washed away.
Hopefully the NHMRC appreciates Karl's heroic actions and funds the grant. Anyway, our grants are due at the Research Office on Monday, so I hope soon we can think of something other than grant writing.

The Glamorous Life of a Professor

Just a quick post tonight. I'm in the middle of trying to write four NHMRC (National Health and Medical Research Council) grants. So its another late night of staring at my laptop, while Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles plays in the background. But I have the joy of running a 9 am prac class for my 3rd year unit in the morning to look forward to!