Meeting Recap vol. 1

So, I promised to do a recap of the meeting, and highlights. This is my first pass. I'll have to do the specifics on the talks from my lab office because I alredy took all my notes to work, and left them on my desk. Part of the problem of having 3 offices...stuff gets lost easily :)

First impressions of the site- New Hampshire is much more rural that I expected! Having been in Woods hole and Cold Springs Harbor, I was expecting fancy multimillion dollar homes. In actuality lots of small places and manufactured homes. Not pretentious at all!

Didn't get to do as much hiking as I'd like- ended up getting involved in dealing with alcohol runs to the local market, as my friend Taylor's postdoc advisor was co-chair of the meeting and the other co-chair was absent because of likelihood of his wife giving birth that week. It was fun though, and got to hang out with Taylor more, and her fellow postdoc Steve. The Madison crew are fun! And will get to see them when I am in Milwaukee in Aug. Beer! Thank goodness for fungi :)

Plans for next month

All in all a good meeting. My talk went well, of course didn't say everything I wanted, in exactly the way I wanted, but I think it was OK. The main points got across. First Gordon conference, and I think I'll try to go next time around, in 2 years, provided I am still in mycology. John Taylor will be a co-chair, so bound to be lots of things I am interested in.

So, this week here in Tucson, getting caught up on some papers, and hopefully getting some work done around the house. Then off to Billings for a week. Really looking forward to it! Will be great to see family, and we're also planning a backpacking trip in the Beartooths.

Then home again for a week, and off to the ESA meeting in Milwaukee. Mainly going for the Fungal ecology workshop, as I got a scholarship to attend the meeting from FESIN.

good summer!

Made it!

Well, I am here in Manchester NH anyway. Still at the airport. An hour away from my final destination. I misread the bus schedule, and turns out I won't be able to catch the bus until 1:30, not 10:30, like I thought (sunday, duh). boohoo. So, at least they are progressive enough to have free wireless at the airport. I am always amazed at the larger airports charging for internet, yet small airports always seem to have it for free. So, I am going to work on my talk for a while. I finished watching a movie, and thought I'd update the blog, just in case anyone is actually paying attention :)

More from the meeting soon.

Meeting time

I'll be heading to a Gordon Conference next week. Specifically, the Cellular & molecular fungal biology conference. I have to give a talk, so will be occupied with that, and not so much blogging. But I'll try to summarize some of the cool work if I can.

Yeast are smarter than people

A recent post on a great site, Panda's Thumb, summarizes a recent article on de novo origination of a gene. What does this mean? de novo is latin for "from new", and its usage is wide, and can mean different things. It can mean "newly arisen function," and might also be referred to as ab initio, or "from the beginning." Anyway, the paper basically shows how brewer's yeast made a brand new gene from a set of nucleotides.