BMFRC Retreat

Today, most of my group is at the lovely Epping Club for the Biomolecular Frontiers Research Centre (BMFRC) annual retreat. Unlike Napoleon (see image below), summer is the season for retreats here in Australia, we have another retreat for a different centre coming up in a week or two. Our BMFRC retreat is an all day event where each of the research groups involved in the centre have 10 minutes to present their research highlights for the year. In addition, we have guest speakers from academia and industry, and a presentation from our silver medal winning iGEM students. Finally, we wind up with a discussion session on the future directions of our research centre. Should be a fun day.

Image of another famous retreat

International Visitors

A clear sign that summer in Sydney is almost upon us, we are hosting a number of international visitors to the Paulsen lab at the moment. We have Peter Henderson and Scott Jackson visiting from the University of Leeds for 5-6 weeks, collaborating on biophysical analyses of multidrug transport proteins that our group are working on. These are proteins that sit in the membranes of bacterial cells and pump drugs out of the cell to make the bacteria resistant to antibiotics and antiseptics. Peter is a  world-leading expert in biochemical analysis of membrane transporters, so it's great having him visit. Anne-Brit Kolsto and Aniko Voros from the University of Oslo are also visiting our lab for 1-2 months collaborating on a project to look at multidrug transport proteins in Bacillus cereus, a pathogen that causes food poisoning (and is the reason why you shouldn't eat cooked rice that has sat at room temperature for too long). Anne-Brit is one of the world's leading researchers on this bacterium, and continues our tradition of having Norwegian collaborators visit here in Sydney. We also have Rebecca Watts visiting from the Queensland Institute of Medical Research (ok, so technically, Queensland isn't really another country). Rebecca is working on a project looking at whether strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa that infect cystic fibrosis patients are functionally different from strains isolated from the environment and other sources.

And its clearly a lovely time to visit Sydney, and admire how our beaches are currently red during the day and glowing blue at night thanks to a dinoflagellate bloom.

red tide in the morning, swimmers warning (photo courtesy of the Sydney Morning Herald)

Too dangerous for me to play

As a recovering MMO (massive multiplayer online) gaming addict, I've been tempted by a number of recent(ish) offerings such as Guild Wars 2, The Secret World, Stars Wars Knights of the Old Republic, etc, which I have so far resisted. I was intrigued on the weekend by a new MMO game developed by Google called Ingress, in which one wanders around the real world with your android phone, checking out whether real world objects have secret mysterious energy fields.

I already have too many problems walking into things in the real world while reading stuff on my iPad, so probably this game won't be for me. Once Google combines it with glasses that overlay a virtual reality on the real world, well then it will be much more difficult to resist. Read Vernor Vinge's "Rainbow's End" for a vision of that sort of future.

Hopefully I won't be sued by Google for using this advertising image

Live by the Grant, Die by the Grant

October and November are always very anxious months for Australian scientists. Traditionally, the results from the major grant rounds from both the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) are announced around this time of the year. It's also an awkward time of the year, if you don't get funding, it's easy to look through the lists of funded projects and become bitter about why was so-and-so funded rather than you when their project is much more boring. Even if you do get funded, you feel bad for your colleagues who didn't get funded (best to avoid making eye contact with them).

The NHMRC grant results came out last Friday, with mixed results for us. We received funding for a collaborative project led by Jon Iredell at Westmead Hospital, to investigate which antibiotics are more likely to disrupt the "society" of beneficial microbes living in a patient's stomach. But we just missed out being funded for our work on looking for novel drug resistance genes in the opportunistic pathogen A. baumannii (on the 0-7 scoring scale used by NHMRC we were about 0.05-0.10 below the funding line).

One thing that became clear to me while sitting on an NHMRC panel this year, is simply the large number of excellent proposals that it's just not possible to fund due to the limited resources of the funding agencies. If we look at the funding statistics from the last ten years or so of NHMRC grants (figure below), usually about three quarters of the grants received are rated as worthy of funding, but only about a quarter of the proposals are actually funded (this year 22%). So, it's always a tough battle for funding.

NHMRC grant stats (taken from the NHMRC web site), lolcat photos are my addition

Batten down the hatches sailor!

Martin Ostrowski, one of the ARC post-doctoral fellows in our group is trading his white lab coat for a hat, safety boots and a lot of sunscreen. He is taking part in a research voyage that will study the lifestyles of marine microbes in the Arafura Sea and along the Great Barrier Reef on the Research Vessel Southern Surveyor. The voyage will consist of 8 days transit from Darwin to Cairns and includes scientists from Macquarie Uni, UTS and UNSW. The science team will collect seawater samples to study microbial communities and gain a better understanding of their contribution to important processes, such as photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation in our surrounding seas.

Hopefully the weather will be clement and the swell will not turn our brave sailors into green tomatoes. Keep looking for some updates along the way (as long as the camera does not fall overboard on a particularly large wave!).

"The RV Southern Surveyor is a national facility available to marine scientists to explore and study Australia's oceans. It is owned and managed by CSIRO, and its operations are funded by the Australian Government to enable oceanographic, geo-science, fisheries and ecosystem research." [http://www.marine.csiro.au/nationalfacility/features/vessel.htm]

The RV Southern Surveyor ready to leave at Darwin's docks

Congratulations and Bon Voyage Dr Kent

Congratulations to Kent Lim, who has now officially completed his PhD! This makes Kent the first PhD student to complete in my group here at Macquarie. Yay!

Kent was extremely hard working and has made significant contributions to our understanding of Pseudomonas bacteria that live on plant roots and protect plants from pathogenic organisms. He has first author publications in PLoS One and Environmental Microbiology, co-authorship on a large paper in PLoS Genetics, another first author manuscript currently under review at Applied and Environmental Microbiology, and two more manuscripts currently in preparation.

Kent is now heading off to Charlotte, North Carolina, where he will be a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Martin Klotz at the University of North Carolina, where I think he is going to be working on global biogeochemical cycles and genome-guided metabolic reconstruction. We'll miss Kent here in the Paulsen lab, but wish him the best of luck in his future scientific endeavours!

Kent and Benny the Beaver (mascot of Oregon State University)- picture taken while Kent was visiting the lab of my collaborator, Joyce Loper in Oregon.

Congrats MQ iGEM team!

Great job by the Macquarie iGEM team, they've brought home a silver medal from Hong Kong (yes silver is the new gold), which is the best result for an Australian team! And they are one of 17 teams (out of 51) from the Asia-Pacific region to be invited to attend the iGEM finals at MIT next month! I'm sure the trip to MIT will be a great experience for the students, and they will be fantastic scientific ambassadors for Macquarie. Full iGEM results can be found here.

The Macquarie iGEM team and their poster in Hong Kong (is that a victory sign? a peace sign? a secret iGEM sign? whats up with the fingers?)