Long-term plans inspire short-term plans

Now that the rush of grant-proposal preparation is over it's time to consider the immediate implications for the experiments we're doing. Because the granting agency's funds are especially tight right now, our plans need to include the possibility that one or both proposals won't be funded in this round, so that we'll need to reapply in September.

(Summaries of both proposals are available on the "What we're planning" page of our lab's web pages (link in sidebar). The complete Sxy proposal is also available there, but the DNA uptake proposal is not because I left one of the figure files at home; I'll post it tomorrow.)

So this afternoon at lab meeting we discussed the proposed DNA uptake experiments, with a particular focus on identifying the aspects of those experiments that will be seen as strong preliminary work in support of a resubmitted application. This was all too easy, because we haven't yet done nearly as much preliminary work as I'd like.

Luckily the post-doc working on uptake is happy to consider new directions (we submitted her paper on Tuesday), and I'm eager to get my hands wet again after so many months of paper and proposal writing (and teaching, though that's not done for another month).